Margaret Soltan’s an English professor at George Washington University, in Washington, DC.

She has childish crushes on James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, and Don DeLillo.

Her 2008 book about beauty — cowritten with her friend and colleague, Jennifer Green-Lewis — is titled Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan. Click on the title to go to its Amazon page, and to read some excerpts from it.

You can see Soltan in all her glory if you download an interview she gave in 2007 – a chat on the PBS Lehrer News Hour about Doris Lessing. Here’s the page:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec07/nobel_10-11.html

You can also hear her talk about Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, to the BBC, if you go here. I’m toward the end of the December 14 program.

Soltan’s most recent media appearance was another interview on the Lehrer News Hour – this one about Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol. Here’s the transcript that includes her remarks.

Soltan’s husband, Karol, is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland. He’s named – Karol Edward – after Charles Edouard Le Corbusier, in whose Paris atelier his father worked after the war.

(Footnote 54, The Final Testament of Père Corbu: “See the letter [Jerzy] Soltan wrote [to LC] from Warsaw on 27 April 1950… ‘Hanka (my wife) is most probably pregnant – if it is a boy, he will certainly be named Charles-Edouard!’”)

Her daughter, Ania Soltan, a sophomore at George Washington University, is a member of the GW Sirens, winners of this year’s (2010) Battle of the A Cappella Bands at GW (Ania’s the blond in glasses just to the left of the soloist). In January of this year she sang in a gospel choir with Bruce Springsteen at the Super Bowl. Her group also sang with him at the Obama inauguration concert.

On Sunday, December 6, 2009, she performed with the same group at the Kennedy Center Honors. They sang The Rising in honor of Bruce Springsteen, one of the honorees. Instead of singing it with Springsteen, who watched from the audience, they sang it with Sting. Here’s a You Tube, with the kid – long blond hair, glasses – showing up at 1:43. (UD thanks a reader for telling her that an earlier You Tube of the event was no longer working.)

Soltan’s sister, Frances, is a Morrissey fanatic. Her niece, Carolyn, is the indispensable webmistress of University Diaries.