Elizabeth S. Goodstein
My first book, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and the German Studies Association/DAAD Book Prize and has been anthologized in both English and German. An Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship supported work in Berlin and Leipzig on an emerging second book project on Georg Simmel—a project advanced and transformed at a later point during a residential fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary appeared in the fall of 2016.
CULTURAL THEORIST
My formation as an interdisciplinary scholar began at the University of Chicago, where I completed my undergraduate work in the Committee for the Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Methods with a BA paper under the direction of David Tracy. After studying Philosophy in Tübingen, Germany with the support of a Rotary Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a University Humanities Fellowship brought me to the University of California at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Interdisciplinary communities at King’s College, Cambridge, where I participated in the “Unofficial Knowledge” initiative, and a Una Fellowship at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley, enriched my dissertation on boredom, which was directed by intellectual historian Martin Jay.
My interdisciplinary teaching career began with pedagogical training in oral argumentation, rhetoric and composition, the history and theory of rhetoric, and German language acquisition, all of which I also taught at Berkeley. After a brief sojourn teaching interdisciplinary humanities at the experimental Deep Springs College in California, I spent two years in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester before joining Emory’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, the second-oldest interdisciplinary graduate institute in the US.
After the closure of Emory’s graduate institute in 2015, I became Professor of English and the Liberal Arts. I am also Core Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Psychoanalytic Studies and have affiliations with Emory’s Departments of Philosophy, History, and German Studies.
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