Ellen Esrock

Biography

Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University (1984) and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington University St. Louis (1972). Professor Esrock teaches courses in modern and postmodern literature and visual art, psychology and literature, visual culture, women writerrs, and theory/history of photography. Working with graduate and undergraduate RPI students, she has completed several photo documentaries of Troy's YWCA. Esrock's first book is a translation of Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James Joyce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.) In 1994 she published The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which was supported by a Harvard Mellon Faculty Fellowship. Currently she is working on Touching Art: Empathy and the Somatosensory System, for which she received a grant from the Italian Academy of Columbia University.

Research Interest

literature