Rate My Professor Max Cavitch

Max Cavitch is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the faculty in 1999 following his B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He serves as Co-director of Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program and is a founding member of the Historical Poetics group. Cavitch holds memberships on the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the consortium of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn's Department of Psychiatry. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the programs in Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. In Literature, his teaching covers many forms and phases of American and Anglophone literature of the modern period.

Cavitch's research specializations include early American literature, poetry and poetics, psychoanalysis, cinema, animal studies, comparative literature, and gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025). Other key publications encompass his edition of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023); co-editor, with Brian Connolly, of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024); and co-translator, with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant, of Jean Louis Schefer's L'homme ordinaire du cinéma [The Ordinary Man of Cinema] (MIT Press, 2016). Forthcoming works include Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (Punctum Books, 2026) and Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography and the Complicity of Reading from Nehemiah to Knausgaard (Columbia University Press). He has published dozens of essays, articles, poems, and translations in journals such as American Literary History, American Literature, PMLA, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and Senses of Cinema, including “Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form” (American Literary History, 2023) and “In the Interest of History” (History of the Present, 2022). Cavitch received the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for Austria in 2024, the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association for his blog Psyche on Campus, which he founded and edits, and the 2012 David Delaura Teaching Award.