Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book was American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He is presently completing a psychopoetic study of the life and writings (chiefly verse) of Richard Nisbett, an Anglo-American slaveholder-turned-asylum-patient. His essays in a variety of fields have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry. Books in progress include: Interloping: Tales of Interspecies Mediality (a preliminary chapter of which, “Curbside Quarantine,” has been published in Postmodern Culture) and Fido and Psyche: Dogs in Psychoanalysis. He is co-editor of the book series Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press); member of the Advisory and Executive Councils of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies; consortium member of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy; member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry; and one of the founding faculty members of the Undergraduate Minor in Psychoanalytic Studies. More information can be found at his Web site.
Publications
- “The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley in Slavery’s Recollective Economies, 1773 to the Present,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Publishing in America, ed. Cécile Cottenet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210-230
- “Clericus and the Lunatick,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107.3 (2013), 367-76
- "Introduction" and guest editor, "New Sitings and Soundings for Transnational Poetics," J19: The Journal for 19th-Century Americanists 1.1 (2013)
- “Slavery and Its Metrics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Kerry Larson (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 94-112
- "American Constitutional Elegy," The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford, 2010), 224-237
- “Stephen Crane’s Refrain,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54 (2008), 33-53; rpt. in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, eds. Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein (Columbia University Press, 2012), 73-90
- "Dickinson and the Exception," A Companion to Emily Dickinson, eds. Mary Loeffelholz and Martha Nell Smith (Blackwell, 2008), 222-34
- "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty," American Literary History 18.1 (2006), 1-28; expanded version in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (Rutgers University Press, 2008), 97-122
- American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
- "Audience Terminable and Interminable: Anne Gilchrist, Walt Whitman, and the Achievement of Disinhibited Reading," Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005), 249-61
- "Richard Nisbett’s Map of the World,” in Steven S. Powers, ed., The Design His Own [Works of Art and Americana, gallery catalog] (Winter 2021), 48-51, on-line