Deborah Elise WhiteAssociate Professor

Deborah Elise White is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University where she wrote a dissertation on the language of allegory in the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her book, Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Stanford UP, 2000) draws on the work of William Collins and William Hazlitt as well as Percy Shelley to show the continuing importance of romantic concepts of imagination for thinking and theorizing the historicity of literature. In 2022 she published with Kir Kuiken (SUNY Albany) a co-edited volume with Bloomsbury: Haiti's Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution. She has also published essays on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers including Coleridge, Derrida, Freud, Hugo and Marx.