Elizabeth Abel

Elizabeth Abel (born 1945 ) is an American literary scholar who, as of 2024, holds the John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography Abel holds the John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. She also is a longtime contributor and editorial board member of Critical Inquiry academic journal.

Research and writing Abel gives her research areas (as of 2024) as "gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction" particularly Virginia Woolf, and "race, cultural studies, and visuality".

Abel's Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), an "important study" of the author Virginia Woolf, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Edited books (ed.) Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. (ed. with Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland) The Voyage in: fictions of female development. Hanover, NH : Published for Dartmouth College by University Press of New England, 1983 (ed. with Emily K. Abel) The Signs reader: women, gender, & scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. (ed. with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen) Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.