Elizabeth GoodsteinProfessor of English and the Liberal Arts -- On Leave 2026-2027

Elizabeth Goodstein is Professor of English and the Liberal Arts.

She belongs to the Core Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Psychoanalytic Studies and is affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy, History, and German Studies.

Goodstein is a theorist of modernity and modern experience and an expert in methods and practices of interdisciplinary inquiry. Her research incorporates ideas and methods from diverse arts and disciplinary traditions, crossing national, linguistic, artistic, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries to explore how human lives are shaped by our ways of knowing—and not knowing—ourselves, others, and the world.​

Goodstein’s first book, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, addresses the socio-cultural and philosophical significance of the modern discourse on boredom as a lived metaphor for a distinctively modern crisis of self in the encounter with empty, meaningless time. Bringing poets and novelists into conversation with sociologists and philosophers, Experience without Qualities won both the MLA Prize for a First Book and the German Studies Association DAAD Prize and helped catalyze the emergence of Boredom Studies. Work on her next book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, was supported in part by the Humboldt Foundation and the American Academy of Berlin. By excavating the philosophical legacy of this pathbreaking and under-appreciated major thinker, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary exposes interlocking histories of memory and forgetting that illuminate the disciplinary organization of labor in the contemporary university.

Goodstein has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on her current book project (read more in the Emory Report.) Nothing to Do: Boredom and Change explores the political significance of boredom, which anchors the mass-mediated dynamics of attention and desire that fuel consumer society yet can also call the meaning and value of that way of life into question. More about this project may be found at www.elizabethsgoodstein.com.

Goodstein teaches cultural and critical theory at both graduate and undergraduate levels, welcoming students from all majors and schools who are interested in pursuing cross- and trans-disciplinary inquiry. Her seminars integrate philosophy and rhetoric, cultural theory and history into the study of literature and culture. Engaging histories, theories, and representations of the modern and modernity in the arts and culture, they challenge participants to situate themselves in relation to longer histories while exploring how social, cultural, and technological change shape and reshape arts and inquiry, identity, language, and lived experience.

Courses include: “No Time to Think: Boredom, Distraction, and Modern Life,” “Imitating Reality,” “Staging the Political: Cultural Criticism and Literary Praxis,” “Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” “Imagining Modernity,” and “Practicing Theory.” A seminar on “Living through Change” fostered reflection and dialogue across disciplines and schools during the pandemic.

Goodstein was one of the founding co-directors of Emory University's decades-long Europe and Beyond Project.

Personal website: www.elizabethsgoodstein.com

“Living through Change: Boredom and the Rhetoric of Modern Experience,” Journal of Boredom Studies, forthcoming 2026.

“The Interdisciplinary Uncanny: On Not Recognizing Richard McKeon” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 58:2, 2025.

“Spectacular Desolation: Boredom as a Political Phenomenon,” in The History and Philosophy of Boredom, ed. Andreas Elpidorou and Josefa Ros Velasco, Routledge, 2025.

“Georg Simmel (1958-1918),” in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Nicolas de Warren, Ted Toadvine, Springer, 2024.

“The Silence of Technology,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 55:1, 2022.

“Boredom, Temporality, and the Historical Dynamics of Abstract Negativity,” in The Dark Side: Philosophical Reflections on the “Negative Emotions", ed. Paola Giacomoni et al, Springer, 2021.

“Simmels Zukunft” in Der Philosoph Georg Simmel, ed Steinbach et al, Karl Alber, 2021.

“Kultur der Moderne” in Metzler-Handbuch Georg Simmel, ed Bohr et al, Metzler, 2021.

“Boredom Studies and the Disciplinary Imaginary,” in The Culture of Boredom, ed. Josefa Ros Velasco, Brill, 2020.

“Thinking at the Boundaries: Georg Simmel’s Phenomenology of Disciplinarity,” in The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 94:2, 2019, 175-187.

“Displacements on a Pathless Terrain: On Reading Kafka’s Der Process,” in Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Espen Hammer, Oxford UP, 2018.

“Money, Relativism, and the Post-Truth Political Imaginary,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, 50: 4, 2017, 483-508.

“Modernism, Relativism, and the Philosophy of Money,” in Money in the German-Speaking Lands, ed. Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley, Berghahn (Spektrum), 2017.

“Between Affect and History: The Rhetoric of Modern Boredom,” in Boredom Studies Reader, ed. Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn, Routledge, 2017.

B.A.   University of Chicago, Ideas and Methods

M.A.  University of California, Berkeley, Rhetoric

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, Rhetoric