Elizabeth Effinger

Elizabeth Effinger is interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, especially Romantic poetry; the interconnections between literature, philosophy, and science; literary theory and human-animal studies; the Gothic (in all ages); and the Anthropocene.

Her research published or in progress covers a range of issues: the queer bodies of Romanticism, in both material and disciplinary senses; the relation between late eighteenth-century German philosophy – specifically theories of aesthetics, evolution, and human and nonhuman nature – and British Romantic Literature; discourses of improvement and theories of Bildung; and the relation between psychoanalysis and nineteenth-century literature.

She is completing a SSHRC-funded book project that examines how Romantic-period philosophers, artists and writers were critically engaged with various Romantic-period disciplines, those branches of learning that were complexly enmeshed with the nonhuman and put increasing pressure on the concept of “the human.” The book argues that a theoretical thinking about the end of man, of a humanism associated with man and his disciplinary formations, and a reflection on what comes after this end, all have their inception in Romantic thought.

Her new SSHRC-supported book project explores how the emergent sciences and technologies of the long Romantic period contributed to the loss of human exceptionality. She is editing (with Chris Bundock) a volume on William Blake and the Gothic. Some of her articles, published and forthcoming, appear in Queer Blake; European Romantic Review; Blake, Gender and Culture; and Romantic Circles.

She has served on executive and advisory boards for the Association for College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR).