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), the Council of Humanities, Princeton University (Fall 2019), and Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2023-2024).  

Prof. Wilson is an editor of differences: A journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 

Prof. Wilson’s research investigates how 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. 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.  

She is also the author of Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Affect and Artificial Intelligence, and Gut Feminism.

Professor Wilson is currently undertaking archival research on Valerie Solanas and the politics of anger and pathology in feminist theory: Corroded with SCUM: Valerie Solanas and Negative States of Mind. She is editing a volume of Solanas’s letters for Duke University Press.