Max Cavitch
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Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104-6273
Former Co-director
Psychoanalytic Studies Minor
University of Pennsylvania
contact: cavitch@upenn.edu
Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers. Before his retirement in 2026, he taught courses on many forms and phases of American and Anglophone literature of the modern period. Now, as an independent scholar, his research interests continue to include Animal Studies, Cinema and New Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) and Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (2025) and the 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). His numerous essays, articles, poems, and translations appear in journals including American Imago, American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Grand, Modern Language Quarterly, Oxford Literary Review, Pennine Platform, Philosophical Salon, Politics/Letters, PMLA, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry. He is the founding editor of the blog, Psyche on Campus, which was the winner of the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is also the editor of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024). His latest book, Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance, is forthcoming from Punctum Books in 2027, and he is currently finishing a new scholarly monograph called Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography and the Complicity of Reading from Nehemiah to Knausgaard, which is under contract with Columbia University Press). He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume, American Poetry: First English Encounters to the U.S. Civil War (Volume 10 in the series, The Oxford History of Poetry in English). Professor Cavitch has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, Maison Dora Maar, Mesa Refuge, the Science History Institute, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, Cornell's Society for the Humanities, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Austen Riggs Center. Before his retirement in 2026, he served as Co-director of Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program. He was also a founding member of the Historical Poetics group, a member of the Advisory and Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a consortium member of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, a member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn's Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.