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 painting.  Her new book, Apropos of Nothing: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

Her previous book is Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008).  She is now writing Melville’s Vision on Herman 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.