Andrew Elfenbein
Professor
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor
Affiliate Faculty, Center for Cognitive Sciences
GLBTQ Scholar, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Ph.D. English, Yale University, 1991
210A Lind Hall
(612)624-1373
elfen001@umn.edu
Andrew Elfenbein researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, the history of authorship, queer theory, linguistics, and cognitive approaches to literacy. His current work focuses on historical linguistics as a theoretical and practical challenge to governing paradigms in literary critical study. In connection with cognitive scientists, he has also begun extensive empirical work on reading in order to provide criticism with better and more sensitive models for the reading process. He has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the Howard Foundation and was a Scholar of the College for the College of Liberal Arts in 2000-2003. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of British Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Genders, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the Victorian Board of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), and the Victorian Board of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.
Department Affiliations
English; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Center for Cognitive Sciences; Educational Psychology
Areas of Expertise
British literature, history, and culture, 1700-1900; cognition and reading; queer theory; the history of English; influence; the study of authorship
Selected Publications
Romanticism and the Rise of English (in progress)
Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Between-Men, Between-Women Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Byron and the Victorians. Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series, 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Paperback edition, 2004.
Editor, Defining Influences, special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, forthcoming.
"Romanticism and the Standardization of English." Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry. Ed. James Chandler and Maureen McClane, forthcoming.
Editor, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Longman Cultural Editions. New York: Longman, 2007.
"Cognitive Science and the History of Reading." PMLA 121 (2006).
"Romantic English." Modern Philology 102 (2004).
"Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth-Century Stage." Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (2001).
"Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy." Nineteenth-Century Literature 56 (2001).
Graduate Courses
Passionate Work: The Work of the Emotions in Eighteenth-Century British and French Literature
Victorian Poetry
Nineteenth-Century Prose
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
The Age of Wollstonecraft
Decadence
Undergraduate Courses
Historical Survey of British Literature I and II
Techniques of Literary Study
GLBT Literatures and Cultures
Introduction to GLBT Studies
Shakespeare
Romanticism