Branka Arsić

Biography Arsić was born in Serbia and received her PhD from the University of Belgrade. She taught at Central European University in Budapest and the State University of New York at Albany before joining the Columbia University faculty in 2012. Her scholarship specializes in the literature of the 19th century Americas and its scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She was praised for "sharing insights that enable students to see canonical literature in a new light, helping them connect those works to contemporary issues and experiences." She was named a Great Immigrant by Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2018. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 in the field of American literature.

Arsić was a visiting professor at Brown University.

Publications

Books Ambient Life: Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment, University of Minnesota Press (2026) Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, Harvard University Press (2016) On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson, Harvard University Press (2010) Passive Constitutions or 7 1/2 Times Bartleby, Stanford University Press (2007) The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett), Stanford University Press (2003)

Edited Collections

Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought, Bloomsbury Academic (2021) Melville’s Philosophies with K.L. Evans, Bloomsbury Academic (2017) American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, Bloomsbury Academic (2014) The Other Emerson with Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press (2007)