English, art history, and literary criticism were Therese STEFFEN's subjects at San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and at the University of Zürich, where she completed her doctorate on William Shakespeare (TWELFTH NIGHT OR, WHAT YOU WILL – Zwölfte Nacht oder, Was  ihr wollt, Sonderband der Englisch-deutschen Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares, Tübingen, 1992). She was assistant and lecturer at the English Department of the University of Zürich, published articles on Eudora Welty, the "New Yorker" cartoon captions, Shakespeare and Rita Dove. Her Habil.thesis, CROSSING COLOR: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, Drama (New York, London: Oxford UP, 2001) is the first monograph on the Afro-American former US poet laureate Rita Dove.

She has coedited (with Elisabeth Bronfen, and Benjamin Marius) HYBRIDE KULTUREN: Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismus-Debatte(Tübingen, 1997), and (with Patrick B. Miller, and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche) THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT REVISITED. Critical Perspectives on the Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States (Münster, Hamburg, London, 2001). She is editor of CROSSOVER, a collection of articles on visual and literary hybridity (Tübingen, 1999), and of MASCULINITIES-MASKULINITÄTEN. Mythos-Realität-Repräsentation-Rollendruck (Stuttgart, 2002).

Therese Steffen was a Fellow (1995–96), and now is a permanent associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. In 1996 she was appointed Oberassistentin, later Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the anglophone context at the University of Basel. Since 1998 she is also Privatdozentin at the University of Zürich and, since 2002, Titularprofessorin of Gender Studies in the anglophone context at the University of Basel, where she focused on issues of ethnicity (Afro-American and African literature and culture), ethics, gender, and literary space. Prof. Steffen retired at the end of Spring Term 2015.