Betsy Erkkila

Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature

University Hall Room 408
Telephone: (847) 491-3097
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: erkkila@northwestern.edu

Betsy Erkkila (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature. Her teaching and research are in the field of American literary and cultural studies, with a particular interest in American poetry, comparative American cultures, race and gender studies, and cultural and political theory. She has been awarded fellowships by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Foundation. She is the author of Mixed Bloods and Other American Crosses: Essays on American Literature and Culture; The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord; Whitman the Political Poet; and Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth. She has published a number of essays and articles on American literature and culture, including "Franklin and the Revolutionary Body" (English Literary History); "Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution" (A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America); "Revolutionary Women" (Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature); "The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary" (Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race); "Emily Dickinson and Class" (American Literary History); "Whitman and the Homosexual Republic" (Walt Whitman Centennial Essays); and "Ethnicity, Literary Theory, and the Grounds of Resistance" (American Quarterly). She is co-editor (with Jay Grossman) of Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, and editor of a new Riverside edition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Writings. She is currently working on a study of American revolutionary writing.

Publications by Betsy Erkkila

Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars

The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets Literary History and Discord

Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies

Walt Whitman Among the French; Poet and Myth

Whitman the Political Poet

Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception (American Critical Tradition No 9)

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