Branka Arsić

Branka Arsić serves as the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, currently on leave for Fall 2025 with her office in Philosophy Hall.

Her research focuses on:

• 19-Century Literatures of the Americas
• History of American Life Sciences
• Religious History of the Americas
• Vitalism
• Ecology
• Material Culture/Object Studies
• Theories of the Archive

She specializes in 19th-century American literary contexts intersecting science, philosophy, and religion.

Her major recognition includes:

• MLA James Russell Lowell prize for Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016)

Key publications encompass On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (2010) and Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (2007). Current projects examine Melville's materialism in Ambient Life and Dickinson's entomological metaphors in Butterfly Tropics.