Elizabeth McHenry

Associate Professor of English Ph.D. 1993 (English), Stanford University; B.A. 1987 (English), Columbia University. Elizabeth McHenry's work focuses on writers and the texts they produce; but she is also interested in recovering the history of readers and the context in which literary texts are distributed, received, and read. In her research and teaching she made wide use of local repositories of rare books and manuscripts, from NYU’s Fales Collection, to the New York Historical Society, to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She read texts by African American authors alongside works by European Americans to explore the critical dialogue between them.