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 transatlantic topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, philosophy, and intellectual history.
She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Chicago, 2022), a study of the idea and logic of "relevance," which calls for shifts in forms of attention and perceptions of importance with enormous social stakes. The book engages with critics, poets, pragmatists, phenomenologists, and linguists—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, William James, Henry James, Alain Locke, Alfred North Whitehead, and Alfred Schutz—as well as artists Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others who make exceptional claims to our attention and who task us with finding the point of what we see. Her previous book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008), looks at the popular devotion that made reverence for British traditions surprisingly instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy.
Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in spring 2026. It reflects on the last day of the fall and liberation of Saigon and on the journalistic coverage of that day; also, on endings and philosophies of defeat, and especially on the beginning of the end of foreign correspondence based in city newspapers--and of the newspaper itself. She is now writing Melville’s Vision on Herman Melville’s fascination with questions of visibility and consciousness in literature, art, and life. Essays have appeared in Representations, PMLA, American Literary History, The Chronicle Review, the London Review of Books, and numerous other publications and collections.
Tamarkin serves as co-chair of the editorial board of Representations and is Past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is the recipient of the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest teaching honor.
