Douglas Mao

An experienced administrator and a distinguished scholar, Douglas Mao assumed his position as the Interim Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Programs in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in November 2025. He will continue in his roles as the Russ Family Professor in the Humanities within the department of English, and as the program chair of five programs in the Advanced Academic Programs division, including Communication, Film and Media, Liberal Arts, Science Writing, and Writing.

In his new interim leadership role, Mao will oversee an extensive portfolio of programs for the Krieger School that includes 26 graduate degree programs, certificate programs, lifelong learning, and professional microcredentials. These offerings serve the current and long-term professional needs of more than 4,000 full-time and part-time graduate students annually, both in-person and online.
Since his arrival at Johns Hopkins in 2007, Mao has served as chair and interim chair of the English Department and co-chaired the University’s self-study during its most recent cycle of reaccreditation. Having worked collaboratively with University leadership and across departments, he is looked to as an innovator who will extend AAP’s record of excellence in learning outcomes and student satisfaction.

As a specialist in modernist fiction and poetry, Mao has taught courses on a wide range of topics in late 19th- and early 20th-century literature – everything from sentimentality in modern writing to the aftermath of literary naturalism, from narratives of utopia to the place of the human in literature after 1900. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, 1998), Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960 (Princeton, 2008), and Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice (Princeton, 2020). Mao is also the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (Duke, 2006) and the editor of the Longman Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (2009).

Past president of the Modernist Studies Association and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship awardee, he currently serves as Series Editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism (from the Johns Hopkins University Press).

Mao received his PhD from Yale University in 1993 and taught in the English departments at Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell before his appointment at Johns Hopkins.