Amy E. Elkins

Amy E. Elkins (Ph.D., Emory University; M.A., University of Virginia; B.A., Hendrix College) teaches courses on modern and contemporary 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 academic writing. She also serves as the Modern Language Association’s elected delegate for Women and Gender in the Profession and has received fellowships from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Rare Books School, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Her first book, Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press), is out this year, and she has started work on a second project about the cultural and artistic history of geothermal springs, swimming, and bathing culture. Her essays have appeared in journals such as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Professor Elkins also interviews writers on visual culture for the Los Angeles Review of Books. As an artist, theorist, and scholar, she emphasizes a dynamic, global approach to research and student-driven inquiry across media.

Areas of Study

• Modernism
• 20^th/21^st-century British literature
• Irish studies
• Caribbean and diasporic literature
• Art theory, archives & visual culture
• Eco-studies
• Queer studies

2022-2023 Academic Year

• Professor Elkins is on leave Fall 2022 – Spring 2023.

Selected Publications

“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.

Selected talks

“Collage Theory at the Activist Border.” Modern Language Association, Feminist Ethics of Protest and Assembly panel. Virtual, January 2021.

“Lo-Fi Modernism” roundtable speaker. Modernist Studies Association. Toronto, October 2019.

“Process & Praxis: Creative Pedagogies in Literary Studies,” Cardiff University, public teaching workshop, June 2019.

“‘Homemade Tech’: Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, and the Art of Critical Making,” University of Southern California, April 2019.

Links

Website: http://amyelkins.net