Elizabeth A. Wilson

Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Sydney, and her B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Otago. She was an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of New South Wales prior to coming to Emory, and she has also held appointments at the University of Western Sydney, the Australian National University, and the University of Sydney. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2003-2004), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2011-2012), and the Council of Humanities, Princeton University (Fall 2019). In 2016-2017 she was the PI for an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar (“New Scholarship on the Affects”). Her work has explored how biological data, psychoanalysis, and affect theory can be used to foster conceptual innovation in feminist theory. Her most recent book (A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations For Affect Theory) is co-authored with Adam Frank (University of British Columbia). Tomkins’s brilliant and complex theories have been influential in the turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences as well as in various branches of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. This Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory and with definitions of the key terms and conceptual innovations in the theory, enabling his work to be used in a wide variety of interdisciplinary contexts. Professor Wilson is currently undertaking archival research on Valerie Solanas.