Elizabeth Abel

Elizabeth Abel serves as the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work centers on modern fiction, with specialized expertise in feminist theory, psychoanalysis, British and American Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and the intersections of race and gender.

Professor Abel is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (which historian Henry Louis Gates praised for giving "new focus to our national dialogue on race"), and Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies. She has also edited Writing and Sexual Difference and co-edited several volumes including 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. Her research on the visual culture of Jim Crow segregation has been particularly influential in understanding the symbolic dimensions of racial subjugation.