English

Amy J. Elias

Amy J. Elias

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ADDRESS
Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts
Website
https://utk.academia.edu/AmyElias
Curriculum Vitae

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Amy J. Elias

Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English; Director, Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts

Post-1960s American literature and culture studies, humanities institutionalism, the novel, narrative theory, science fiction and speculative arts, art and science, time and history studies, environmental humanities

Amy J. Elias is UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English, is a specialist in post-1960s arts as well as humanities institutionalism, and primarily teaches in the areas of speculative fiction, narrative theory, and contemporary literature. She currently serves as Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts. Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), which was winner of the George and Barbara Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, two journal special issues, and more than 35 articles and book chapters. She is editor of Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke UP, 2025) and co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern UP, 2015) and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). She was principal founder of the international arts association ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of its scholarly journal ASAP/Journal (Johns Hopkins UP), which won three national publishing awards. She has been the recipient of NEH grants for cross-disciplinary research in humanities computing, public humanities engagement, and literature and values. As director of the Denbo Center, she is a member of the executive boards of Humanities Tennessee, The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Big Ears Festival, the UTK Institute for American Civics, Knoxville’s Delaney Legacy Project, and UT Africana Studies.

Education

  • Ph.D., English. American Studies Minor. The Pennsylvania State University
  • M.A., English. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
  • B.A.,  English. Summa cum laude, Distinction in English. Wilkes University

Specialties

Post-1960s American literature and culture studies, humanities institutionalism, the novel, narrative theory, science fiction and speculative arts, art and science, time and history studies, environmental humanities

Honors

  • 2022-23 Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, Office of the Chancellor, University of Tennessee
  • 2019-20. Leadership Program, Office of the Provost, University of Tennessee
  • 2019 Excellence in Humanities Award, Office of Research and Engagement, University of Tennessee
  • 2019 Inductee, Phi Beta Kappa
  • 2018 “Amy J. Elias Founder’s Award,” ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Named fund for international arts association to provide support for independent artists, adjuncts, and graduate students

Grants

  • PI, NEH Connections Grant (Planning Grant), 2021, with Hilary Havens (English) and Amir Sadovnik (Computer Science), “Designing a ‘Humanistic Computing’ Curriculum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.” Proposal narrative posted at NEH website as one of their 3 example proposal narratives.
  • PI, NEH Collaborative Research Grant, 2019, for the symposium “In a Speculative Light: The Arts of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney” held on Feb. 19-21, 2020.

Publications

Books:

  • Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. Ed. Amy J. Elias. Durham and London: Duke University Press, February 2025. 20 contributors, 32 color plates.
  • Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. Eds. Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 
  • The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century. Eds. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 
  • Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Recent Articles:

Online and Organizational work: