The Words, April 2016
Macalester English Welcomes Professor Amy Elkins
Josh Weiner ’16
The English Department is thrilled to announce that Amy Elkins has been hired for the position of Assistant Professor of 20th and 21st Century Literature. Professor Elkins will begin teaching in the Fall of 2016, just a few short months away.
Professor Elkins is currently a Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a graduate of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas and holds a master’s degree from the University of Virginia. Professor Elkins brings a formidable breadth of scholarly interests, a passion for teaching, and endless energy to the Department. Her dissertation, titled “Crafting Modernity: Art Making, Gender, and Literature’s Materials of Resistance in the Extreme Twentieth Century,” combines literary analysis and novel archival research to, in her words, “develop a new vocabulary for understanding the role of art processes in the making of modern and contemporary literature.”
An artist herself, Professor Elkins’ multimedia scholarly research involves a lot more than just reading books and journal articles. She told The Words, “I think it’s important to ask hard questions about the world we live in, but it’s equally important to be bold in how we seek answers.” Professor Elkins certainly seeks answers in bold ways; she has worked with professional photographers, interviewed the authors she analyzes, and dug through the personal effects of famous modernist writers to find their previously undiscovered works of art. She boasts an impressive array of accolades, including numerous fellowships from Emory, a Reese Fellowship, awards and grants for her papers and travels, and most recently an award for “Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy” from Emory University.
The interdisciplinary nature of Professor Elkins’ academic work comes through in her teaching as well. In fact, she doesn’t see her research and teaching as distinct: “I see my students as collaborators in the creative process.” Encouraging her students to be “bold” in how they seek answers, she enjoys presenting seemingly incongruous materials to students, and “seeing what happens.” In her classroom, Professor Elkins makes it a priority to introduce students to practices of interdisciplinary analysis, allowing them to take their own learning beyond the vital — but not all-encompassing — tasks of reading and writing about literature. Herself a graduate of a small liberal arts college, Professor Elkins is committed to the liberal arts approach and can’t wait to teach at Macalester. “When I got to campus I was really impressed by the students and the high level of conversation, even casually. I was excited to see students at Mac interested in asking questions about the value of interdisciplinary methods,” she said, “My classes at Macalester will combine literary study and hands-on learning, emphasizing a range of scholarly domains from close reading and academic dialogue to art workshops and installation projects.”
Professor Elkins will teach two courses next fall: ENGL 137, “The Novel: On Beauty” and an upper level course, ENGL 240, “The Politics of Place: Twentieth-Century British Literature.” Both will include a creative component.