ELIZABETH S. GOODSTEIN

Professor of English and the Liberal Arts

Emory University

LIVING THROUGH CHANGE & THE LIBERAL ARTS

As a theorist of modernity and modern experience and an expert in methods and practices of interdisciplinary inquiry, I kindle conversations that cross national, linguistic, artistic, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries.

As a thinker and teacher, I seek to open new possibilities for the future by exploring how human lives are shaped by our ways of knowing—and not knowing—ourselves, others, and the world.

I strive to extend and renew the liberal arts for the twenty-first century by studying the historical, cultural, social, and technological evolution of knowledge practices and their impact on lived experience, incorporating ideas and methods from diverse arts and disciplinary traditions to disclose new perspectives for both theory and practice.

Research Interests: Cultural and critical theory; histories, theories, and representations of the modern and modernity in the arts and culture; psychoanalysis, culture, and emotion regimes; the rhetoric and genealogy of the disciplines and disciplinarity; interdisciplinary methods and project design.

Recent Publications

The Interdisciplinary Uncanny:

On Not Recognizing Richard McKeon

Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 58, Number 2, 2025, pp. 127-158

Revered and feared during his lifetime, Richard McKeon left a rich and ambiguous intellectual legacy. The architect and practitioner of a cosmopolitan and expansive, historically and philosophically self-reflexive interdisciplinarity who reimagined liberal arts education for an era of transformation delighted in transcending bound- aries and destabilizing assumptions and in demonstrating the relativity of every foundation to a particular constellation of ideas and methods. This essay explores the uncanny legacy of McKeon’s simultaneously visionary and old-fashioned style of thought, meditating on the timeliness, at this moment of crisis in and beyond the university, of a philosophical pluralism that embraces multiplicity, ambiguity, and difference without abandoning the commitment to critique.