English Department
Catholic Studies
Professor
Ph.D., Yale University
Fields: English and American Poetry; Religion and Literature; Modernism; Catholic Fiction; Shakespeare and the Renaissance.
• Lee Oser Wikipedia Page »
• CV (PDF)»
Email: leeoser@holycross.edu
Office Phone: 508-793-2208
Office: Fenwick 219
PO Box: 186A
Office Hours: M 3:30-4:30 via Zoom, and by appt.
Biography
Lee Oser was born in New York City in 1958, of Irish Catholic and Russian Jewish descent. He attended public high school on Long Island. After playing in rock bands and working odd jobs in Portland, Oregon, he took his B.A. from Reed College in 1988 and his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1995. The College of the Holy Cross hired him in 1998. As a scholar, he began his career in the field of literary modernism and is widely recognized as an authority on the poet T. S. Eliot. Over the past decade, though, he has devoted considerable time to Shakespeare. Professor Oser has published three books of literary criticism and three novels, most recently Oregon Confetti, named by Commonweal Magazine as one of its top books of 2017. He is the father of two daughters, Eleanor (HC '20) and Briana. He and his wife, Kate, have been married for thirty years. A committed Roman Catholic, he serves regularly as an extraordinary minister at Saint Paul's Cathedral, in downtown Worcester.