Max Cavitch

Max Cavitch is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and codirector of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. Cavitch is also an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema and New Media Studies; Comparative Literature; Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) and of dozens of peer-reviewed and public-facing articles in a variety of fields. He is the editor of a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, forthcoming this fall from Oxford University Press; coeditor (with historian Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies, forthcoming in 2024 from Duke University Press; and co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT Press, 2016). Cavitch is the founding editor of the blog, Psyche on Campus, which recently won the Excellence in Journalism Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association. Cavitch is currently completing several books, including Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance, which will be the focus of his work as a Beckman Center Fellow. An avid photographer, he regularly contributes observations to the public-science project, iNaturalist and has exhibited work in a number of galleries. An amateur geologist, he likes to relax by doing some artisanal mining along the Wissahickon.