Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford and joined English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC Irvine. She works in American literary and intellectual history before 1900, with special interest in the transatlantic eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in American visual arts. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008) and is currently writing a book on the history of ideas of relevance and irrelevance in art, politics, and philosophy.  Professor Tamarkin is the recipient of an ACLS Fellowship, a President’s Research Fellowship, and a Chancellor’s Fellowship. She serves on the editorial board of Representations and is past president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.