Elizabeth Effinger

I'm a literature professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

I've written here about my experience leading (with Dr. Sue Sinclair, UNB English) a SSHRC-funded public humanities project, titled _Erasing Frankenstein_, which, as part of the worldwide celebrations of Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ in 2018, brought together university students and incarcerated and non-incarcerated members from Walls to Bridges to create the first book-length erasure poem out of Shelley's infamous novel.

My interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, especially Romantic poetry; the interconnections between literature, philosophy, and science; literary theory and human-animal studies; the Gothic (in all ages); and the Anthropocene.

My research published or in progress covers a range of issues: the queer bodies of Romanticism, in both material and disciplinary senses; the relation between late eighteenth-century German philosophy – specifically theories of aesthetics, evolution, and human and nonhuman nature – and British Romantic Literature; discourses of improvement and theories of Bildung; and the relation between psychoanalysis and nineteenth-century literature.

My new SSHRC-supported book project explores how the emergent sciences and technologies of the long Romantic period contributed to the loss of human exceptionality. I am editing (with Chris Bundock) a volume on William Blake and the Gothic. Some of my articles, published and forthcoming, appear in Queer Blake; European Romantic Review; Blake, Gender and Culture; and Romantic Circles.