Whistler's Mothers: Painters, Models, and Uncanny Arrangements

Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty affiliate of Penn's programs in Comparative Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. He is also a founding faculty member and current co-director of Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program, and the founding editor of the blog Psyche on Campus, for which he was a winner of the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles on American and African American Literature, Cinema Studies, Poetry and Poetics, and Psychoanalytic Studies, as well as two scholarly monographs: American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025). He is the editor of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024). Cavitch's forthcoming books include Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (Punctum Books), Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography from Nehemiah to Knausgård (Columbia University Press), and Fido and Psyche: Dogs in and around Psychoanalysis, 1871 to the Present: An Illustrated History, which is the focus of his research as the 2025 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna and the Sigmund Freud Museum.