Elizabeth Abel, Professor
Office: 424 Wheeler
Phone: 510-642-2906
Email: eabel@berkeley.edu
Areas of Interest
20th-Century American Literature. African American Literature. 20th-Century British Literature. Cultural Studies. Gender & Sexuality Studies.Professional Statement
My work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender theory, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (especially Woolf and Morrison). The second is race, cultural studies, and visuality. I am currently completing a book entitled Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, which charts the cultural history of segregation signs through their mediation by photography.Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. (Chicago, 1982).Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 1989).
"Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York, 1990).
Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation," Critical Inquiry 19, 3 (Spring 1993).
Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, co-ed. with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (Berkeley, 1997).
"Domestic Borders, Cultural Boundaries: Black Feminists Re-view the Family," The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, NH, 1999).
"Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow's Racial Symbolic," Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999).
"The Languages of Segregation," Bellagio, Italy, 2000.
"Counter Narratives: Sit-ins and the Social Body in the 1960s," Berkeley Conference on Race and Mass Culture, 2000.
"The Punctum and the Archive: Photography and the Grounds of Criticism," College Art Association, Chicago, 2001.
"In the Matter of Jim Crow: An Anthropology of Signs," American Studies Association, New York, 2003.
"Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater," Charles Mills Gayley Lecture, Berkeley, 2004.
"Mania, Depression, and the Future of Theory, Critical Inquiry 30, 2 (Winter 2004).
"Shadows," Representations 84 (Spring 2004), 166-199.
Office Hours
TTh 5-6, 424 Wheeler
W 1:30-3, 319 Wheeler
