Elizabeth D. Harvey

Professor Elizabeth Harvey specializes in the early modern literature, the early modern reception of classical literature; the history of medicine and the medical humanities; gender studies, literary theory, and psychoanalytic theory.
Her work has been generously supported by grants, fellowships, and awards that include (most recently) various SSHRC research grants, a long-term Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a residential fellowship at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a Jackman Humanities Institute residential Faculty Fellowship, and a Northrop Frye Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research. She is also a psychoanalyst in private practice.

She is currently completing two academic books. One is a co-authored book (with Timothy Harrison, University of Chicago), entitled John Donne’s Physics. The study investigates how Donne’s autobiographical account of his near fatal illness in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions supplies through its difficult, knotty language a portrait of the author’s emotional, spiritual, and intellectual confrontation with seventeenth-century developments in science and medicine. John Donne’s Physics examines how thought is interlaced with affect through Donne’s highly self-reflexive experiments with language and figuration and how his apostrophes to God illuminate Donne’s mind in its encounter with the epistemological tumult of his historical moment. The second project is a book on Anne Carson, called Mourning Time. The book explores negative poetics, anachronism, and psychoanalytic thought in order to elaborate Carson’s theories about poetry, translation, grief, classical literature, and consciousness.

Publications

Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History, Ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Theresa Krier, Routledge, 2004.

Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, Ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and Renaissance Texts, (Routledge, 1992);

Women and Reason (co-edited with Kathleen Okruhlik), University of Michigan Press, 1992;

Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (co-edited with Katharine Eisaman Maus), University of Chicago Press, 1990;

Articles (recent)

“Shades” in Anne Carson and Antiquity, ed. Laura Jansen, Bloomsbury, 2021:105-118.

“Medicine and the Emotions” in Shakespeare and Emotion, ed. Katharine A. Craik, Cambridge University Press, 2020: 34-48.

“Speaking (of) Faces” in The Geography of Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Oxford University Press, 2020: 197-223.

“‘Straunge Characters’ and Early Modern Psyches: Spenser’s Busirane and Donne’s ‘Valediction of my name, in the window’” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, ed. Yulia Ryhzik, Manchester University Press, 2019: 157-170.

“Affect, Perfume, and Early Modern Sensory Boundaries,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5. 3, Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities (Fall 2018): 31-50.

“Winged Desire: The Erotics of Ensoulment,” in Eros, Family, and Community, ed. Yoav Rinon, Olms Weidmann Verlag, 2016: 67-84.

“Exploring the Poetics of Phrenology in Daniel Scott Tysdal’s ‘Assemble Like So’,” Ars Medica 10.2. (2015): 110-122.

“Tongues of Glaciers: Sedimenting Language in Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn/Library of Water and Anne Carson’s “Wildly Constant” (co-author Mark A. Cheetham), Word and Image 31.1, 2015: 1-9.

“Passionate Spirits: Animism and Embodiment in Cymbeline and The Tempest,” in A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race, ed. Valerie Traub, Oxford University Press (2016): 369-384.

Forum: “Manimals: Early Modern Animal/Human Interfaces,” co-edited with Susan Zimmerman, Shakespeare Studies XLI (2013): 19-124.“Introduction,” co-author Susan Zimmerman, Shakespeare Studies XLI (2013): 19-28.

“Introduction,” co-author Susan Zimmerman, Shakespeare Studies XLI (2013): 19-28.

“Beastly Physic,” Shakespeare Studies XLI (2013): 114-24.

“Embodied Resonances: Magnetism and Analogy in Donne’s Anniversaries” co-author Timothy Harrison, ELH, 80.4 (Winter 2013): 981-1008.

“Spenser and Psychoanalytical Criticism,” Handbook of Spenser Studies, ed. Richard A. McCabe, Oxford University Press, 2010: 775-91.

“The Portal of Touch,” American Historical Review, 116.2 (April, 2011): 385-400.

“Samson Agonistes and Milton’s Sensible Ethics” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, Oxford University Press, 2009: 649-66.