Featured Scholar: January 2024

Dr. Elissa Zellinger (Associate Professor, English)

What are you watching/streaming?

I just finished the most recent seasons of Reservation Dogs and Righteous Gemstones. My husband and I have been slowly working our way through a box set of Wong Kar-wai films. I saw Barbie twice. And I am forever watching Teen Titans Go! with my kids. 

What games are you playing?

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. IYKYK.

What are you listening to?

A lot of Yo La Tengo like the boring, aging hipster that I am. Otherwise, I am usually streaming Sunday Baroque. 

What are you reading?

Matrix by Lauren Groff made my head explode. I devoured Jessica Gross's Hysteria in about 48 hours. The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen was delightfully cringey. I love a good gigantic novel like The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. Lots of Calvin and Hobbes with my kids and a steady diet of 19th century poems that rhyme. 

What are you writing/thinking about?

I am working on my second book project, The Poetics of Profession, which combines public poetry, US monuments, and the discourse of professionalism to explore the racialized rationale underpinning memorialization in the United States. I examine poets and public figures—H. Cordelia Ray, Frederick Douglass, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Akers Allen—who leveraged their professional status to revise the racialized knowledge that US public monuments produced.