Elizabeth Abel
Elizabeth Abel | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1945 |
| Occupation(s) | Scholar, professor |
| Years active | –present |
| Employer(s) | University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | Scholarship in literature, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf studies |
| Notable work | Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis; Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow; Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies |
Elizabeth Abel (born 1945) is a distinguished American scholar specializing in literature who, as of 2024, occupies the John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Biography
Currently, Abel serves as the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this appointment, she held a position as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
Research and writing
As of 2024, Abel’s scholarly interests encompass "gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction," with a particular emphasis on Virginia Woolf. Her work also addresses topics related to "race, cultural studies, and visuality."
In 1981, she acted as guest editor for a special edition of Critical Inquiry titled 'Writing and Sexual Difference'. Kathryn West notes in Abel’s entry within the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory that this collection of essays represented a pivotal moment in feminist literary theory, shifting focus from merely recovering marginalized traditions to critically engaging dominant narratives through detailed historical analyses of women's reinterpretation of established themes and literary styles.
Her 1989 publication, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, offers a significant examination linking Woolf’s writings to psychoanalytic frameworks developed by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, as well as to social anthropology from the 1920s. According to scholar Lisa Ruddick, Abel effectively illustrates how Woolf assimilated Freud’s concepts regarding gender identity while reconfiguring them from a feminist standpoint.
Abel’s subsequent scholarship includes the 2010 volume Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, which provides an extensively researched critique of the visual culture surrounding racial segregation in the United States. Although commended for its thoroughness, some reviewers have pointed out shortcomings such as the absence of interviews with activists and occasional tendencies toward over-interpretation of visual materials.
Works
- Books authored
- Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
- Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
- Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
- Books edited
- (ed.) Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- (ed., with Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland) The Voyage in: fictions of female development. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983.
- (ed., with Emily K. Abel) The Signs reader: women, gender, & scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
- (ed., with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen) Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.