Elisa Tamarkin’s most recent book is Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon, published by University of Chicago Press. It is a reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America’s obvious defeat, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and especially in photographs of the war’s end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the “literature of the day” that was “done in a day.” Done in a Day blends history, criticism, and memoir to tell the paired stories of Saigon's liberation and the demise of the news. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.
Tamarkin’s previous books include Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Chicago 2022), a meditation on the logic and idea of relevance, calling for shifts in forms of attention and in perceptions of importance and interest 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 Schütz—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. She is also the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago 2008) on the popular devotion, after the American Revolution, that made reverence for British traditions and style, the love of monarchy, and a belief in the value of loyalty surprisingly instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy.
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.
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.
