Elizabeth WilsonDirector of Undergraduate Studies - WGSSSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor - WGSS

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. (Hons) 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 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 Professor 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. The Digital Publishing in the Humanities Initiative at Emory has made A Silvan Tomkins Handbook available Open Access. Professor Wilson is currently undertaking archival research on Valerie Solanas and the politics of anger and pathology in feminist theory. Professor Wilson is currently a member of the Digital Monograph Writers Workshop at Emory’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI), a workshop supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and in 2023-2024 she is a Senior Fellow at the FCHI.