Research Expertise and Interest
feminist theory, psychoanalysis, British and American Modernism, Virginia Woolf, race and gender
Research Description
Elizabeth Abel's general research interest is modern fiction and her areas of special interest are feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race, and gender.
She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis; Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow; and Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies. She is also the editor of Writing and Sexual Difference; and the co-editor of The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development; The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship; and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism.
In the News
Jim Crow signs as symbols of subjugation, trophies of triumph
In the mid 1960s, landmark laws brought an official end to the system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow. Professor Elizabeth Abel explores the “visual politics” of a system that shaped experience and perception throughout the American South (and beyond) for nearly a century — in a book praised by historian Henry Louis Gates as giving “new focus to our national dialogue on race.”