Elizabeth Abel, Professor Emeritus and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emeritus in English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a scholar whose work centers on modern Literature. Her research interests include feminist theory, psychoanalysis, British and American modernism, Virginia Woolf, race, gender, and twentieth-century African American literature. Abel's first monograph, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), uncovers the legacies of Freud and Melanie Klein in Woolf’s narrative strategies. Her second book, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2010), charts the cultural history of segregation signs mediated by photography. Her most recent publication, Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (2024), explores the subtle resonances of Woolf's writing in unexpected cultural traditions and authors such as Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W.G. Sebald.

In addition to her monographs, Abel has edited influential collections including Writing and Sexual Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1982), The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship (1983), and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (University of California Press, 1997). Her publication record encompasses essays such as "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation" (Critical Inquiry, 1993), "Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow's Racial Symbolic" (Critical Inquiry, 1999), "Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning, Mania" (Critical Inquiry, 2018), and contributions to volumes like Modernism and Autobiography (2014) and Nancy Chodorow and the Reproduction of Mothering: Forty Years On (2020). Abel's ongoing research on resonance as a framework for literary transmission, sponsored by the France-Berkeley Fund, has organized colloquia in Paris and Berkeley (2019, 2022), with a final colloquium planned for spring 2024 and a forthcoming edited volume. Her work in Literature integrates gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and visuality.

Professional Email: eabel@berkeley.edu