Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford and joined English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC, Irvine.  She teaches and writes about American literature as well as topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, and art. 

She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008).  She is now writing Melville’s Vision on Melville’s lifelong fascination with questions of visibility and consciousness in literature, art, and life.  Tamarkin is the recipient of an ACLS Fellowship, a President’s Research Fellowship, and a Chancellor’s Fellowship.  She serves on the editorial boards of Representations and Nineteenth-Century Literature and on the advisory board of PMLA.  She is Past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.