Professional Biography

Elizabeth S. Anker teaches in the Department of English at Cornell University, and her work focuses on contemporary world literature, law and literature, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Her first book, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (Cornell University Press 2012), draws on phenomenology to develop an embodied politics of reading and account of human rights. In addition, she has recently published on animal rights in New Literary History and the 9/11 novel in American Literary History. Her current book project, “Constitutional Failure and the Aesthetic Formations of Sovereignties in Crisis,” examines how the challenges of constitutionalism are imagined in literature, architecture, and film. In addition, she is working on two co-edited collections, one on new directions in law and literature and another on the hermeneutics of suspicion.