Shelley Fisher Fishkin

She is the Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and Co-Director (with Gordon Chang) of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. In 2019, on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Fishkin and Chang published a co-edited volume The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (2019).

Fishkin served as the president of the American Studies Association (2004-2005), and the president of Mark Twain Circle of America (1998-2000). She was also the co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. A specialist in Mark Twain, Fishkin was awarded the John S. Tuckey award “for lifetime achievements and contributions to Mark Twain Studies" at the International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies in 2017. In honor of her work in transnational studies, the American Studies Association named its annual prize for best publication in transnational American Studies the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin (born May 9, 1950) is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University.

Fishkin rediscovered Mark Twain's 1898 play "Is He Dead?" in the archives of the Mark Twain Papers at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley and published an edition of it in 2003. She was a producer of the play on Broadway, where it debuted in 2007, adapted by David Ives and directed by Michael Blakemore.