Amy E. Elkins

Amy E. Elkins (Ph.D., Emory University; M.A., University of Virginia; B.A., Hendrix College) teaches courses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and interdisciplinary studies. Professor Elkins has special interests in art theory and visual culture, intersectional feminist approaches to the archive and cultural history, and experimental/multimedia/collaborative academic writing. She’s also the editor of the queer and feminist theory forum, “Orientations,”  for Modernism/Modernity Print Plus and is serving a second term as the Modern Language Association’s elected delegate for Women and Gender in the Profession. As an artist, theorist, and scholar, Prof. Elkins emphasizes a dynamic, global approach to research and student-driven inquiry across media. She received Macalester’s Educator of the Year award for 2020-2021, and is a current Digital Liberal Arts Faculty Fellow. 

She is the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2022; paperback edition, 2025) and continues to write on modernism (and metamodernist afterlives), archives, and craft with forthcoming chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms (Oxford University Press) and the Text & Techne: Textile Poetics and Poetic Textiles (Bloomsbury Academic). Prof. Elkins is at work on two new projects: one that considers theories of fluidity, flux, and flow in the cultural history of bathing rituals, geothermal springs, and other immersive experiences—and archives—of wellbeing. And a second major academic monograph that uses the space of the institutional archive as an experimental laboratory for new approaches to creative-critical research in the humanities. Using the intersection of literary studies and art/craft history, this project demonstrates the value of research-creation, counter-archives, collaboration, and creative-critical fabulation (a form of scholarly storytelling) to more inclusive models of higher education and humanities research. Her essays have appeared in journals such as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 

Professor Elkins is also a public humanities scholar who interviews writers on visual culture for the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to collaborative and multimedia writing in venues such as Modernism/Modernity Print +, Post45 Contemporaries, and Inscription Journal, she is passionate about conversations that cross the art-scholarship divide. She has been in conversation with Ocean Vuong for the Novel Dialogue podcast and Lorna Goodison at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Her current arts practice explores narrative quilt-making, poetry broadsides, medium format photography, and embodied filmmaking. She is writing her first novel. 

Areas of Study

Modernism
20th/21st-century British literature
Irish studies
Diasporic literatures
Art theory
archives &amp
visual culture
Eco-studies
Queer theory and gender studies

Fall 2025 Courses

ENGL 137-01 Dark Academia
ENGL 210-01 Film Studies: Poetry in Motion
ENGL 294-02 Queer Classics

Spring 2026 Courses

ENGL 240-01: Irish Literature
ENGL 262-01: Cottagecore

Selected Publications

“Sequences of Touch: Wool Roving, Dried Flowers, Linen Rags, Rotten Potatoes,” co-authored with Sheryda Warrener, Claire Battershill, and Jayme Collins. Inscription: The Journal of Material Text—Theory, Practice, History, October 2023. online.

“Ali Smith’s Leavings: Postcards, Letters, and the Unbound Book,” with Deidre Shauna Lynch. Post45 Contemporaries, May 2022. online.

“The Weaver’s Handshake,” a film-essay. Special issue of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture on “Craft,” December 2021. online.

“’Draw deep from your palette’: Lorna Goodison’s Poetics of Pigment,” Contemporary Literature 61.1 (Spring 2020): 89-117.

“Typestruck: On Women and Writing Machines,” co-written with Glenn Adamson,
Modernism/Modernity Print+ Visualities series, edited by Alix Beeston, July 2020. online.

“Uncovering Jean McConville: Seamus Heaney’s Poetic Cartography of the Disappeared,” with Roan O’Neill (collaborative research project with Macalester advisee, funding from Mellon Foundation Lifelong Learners), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 22.3 (2020): 218-39.

“From the Gutter to the Gallery: Berenice Abbott Photographs Mina Loy’s Assemblages,” PMLA Little Known Documents 134.5 (2019): 1094-1103.

Links

Website: http://amyelkins.net