Helen Regueiro Elam

Professor Elam writes and teaches on 19th and 20th century poetry (British, American, French) and literary theory. Her current project, Strange Spaces, focuses on the dis-articulation of space in philosophical and poetic texts (Plato, Dickinson, Hölderlin), and deals with a moment in each text where movement and direction are “arrested.” Another project, stemming from this one, involves Vanishings in poetry: at the edge of such spaces, at the moment of arrest, a study of the process of “disparition” whose name is synonymous with poetry.

She teaches graduate courses on literary theory, translation, and poetry, and undergraduate courses on poetry and criticism from the ancients to the moderns.

She also organizes a yearly International Colloquium - Living in Languages: On Translation, and is Editorial Advisor for the Living in Languages Journal.

Selected Items

Publications 

The Limits of Imagination: Wordsworth, Yeats, and Stevens. Cornell University Press, 1976. 

The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming. (Edited with Frances Ferguson) 

Studies in Romanticism, editor special issue, Winter 1996. 

Recent Essays

“Remembering to Die” (on Keats’ Grecian Urn), Romantic Circle Praxis, October 2003. (www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/grecianurn) 

"Whispers out of Time" (on Beckett's Waiting for Godot). Samuel Beckett, ed. Jennifer Jeffers. Garland, 1998. 

Awards

Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, State University of New York system (1981) 

NEH Visiting Professor of the Humanities, Fall semester, Hartwick College (1991) 

Excellence in Teaching Award, Hartwick College, 1991 

Fulbright Professor - Literary Theory, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina (1991-92)