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. She has served 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. 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.

She is the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2022) 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 a new project 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. 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.

Areas of Study

• Modernism
• 20th/21st-century British literature
• Irish studies
• Diasporic literature
• Art theory, archives & visual culture
• Eco-studies
• Queer theory and gender studies
• Somantics and cognition

Fall 2025 Courses

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

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