Terry Castle '75Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Stanford University
 Terry Castle ’75, daughter of British parents, was born in San Diego and lived in England and Southern California as a child. After graduating from high school in San Diego—she attended a large and somewhat alienating public high school—Terry went north to Tacoma to attend University of Puget Sound. Puget Sound was a welcome change. “In those days it was sort of off the beaten track, a backwater of sorts, and I found it a very dreamy, sheltering, almost Zen-like place,” Terry says of campus. “The slow drizzle of four years was consoling to me.”
Terry began as a history major, but soon switched to English. "I realized I was more interested in fantasy than fact," she acknowledges. A professor of British Literature at Stanford for more than 20 years, Terry has found success as an author, critic, and book reviewer. She has written essays for London Review of Books, The Atlantic, Slate, New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and many other journals and magazines. Terry’s books include The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995); Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (2002); and the prize-winning collection The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003).
“Writing is an addiction for me,” says Terry. “Though I often find it agonizingly difficult, I just have to do it. I want to try to put the world—or at least my experience of the world—into language. Writing is an art form, and like every art form it's about trying to understand life: why I’m alive, why you're alive, why anyone’s alive.”
In addition to her career as a writer and educator, Terry is also a visual artist. (Some of her recent collages, gouaches, and altered photographs can be seen on her blog.) She sees art-making as a way of expressing herself in a more spontaneous and less cerebral way. “Art has always been a part of my life,” Terry says. “I like it because I can be amateurish about it. Being an 'amateur' at something is wonderful: one is free to experiment, to be irresponsible. Obviously making art is for me a way of recharging my batteries; the rest of my life is so intensely bound up with reading and writing. But I also love the weird and unexpected things that can result. I still have some very strange woodcuts I made in the early ’70s when I was a macramé-wearing hippie-chick at Puget Sound."
Major: English
Campus Life: Terry lived in Anderson/Langdon Hall freshman year, and began her sophomore year in a then residence hall called the Buffalo Rose Hotel.
Graduate School: Ph.D. in English, University of Minnesota
Hobbies: Terry devotes much of her free time to photography, painting, and her dogs, a mutt named Charlie and a pedigree miniature dachshund, Wally, named for Wallace Simpson, the late Duchess of York.
Photo by Team Orange 2007 | 
