Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford and joined English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC Irvine. She specializes in American literary and cultural history before 1900, with special interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her research and teaching focus on transatlantic cultures, slavery and antislavery, theories of style and social form, the intersections of class and race, and American visual arts.  She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008) and is currently at work on a book project entitled “Irrelevance: Reading for Value in the Age of News” on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830 and on forms of perspective in literature, art, philosophy, and logic.  Professor Tamarkin is the recipient of an ACLS Fellowship, a President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and, in 2007, was named Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Irvine.