Biography
Betsy Erkkila is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, where she taught courses in early and nineteenth-century American literature, comparative American cultures, gender studies, and cultural and political theory. She is the author of Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth (Princeton UP, 1980); Whitman the Political Poet (Oxford UP, 1988); The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (Oxford UP, 1992); Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (U Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and The Whitman Revolution–Sex, Poetry, and Politics (Iowa UP, 2020). She is co-editor with Jay Grossman of Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (Oxford UP, 1996); and editor of Whitman’s Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: “Live Oak, with Moss” and “Calamus” (Iowa UP, 2011). She was awarded a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to complete a book entitled Imagining the Revolution: Literature and Politics in Insurrectionary America. She is currently completing a short book entitled The Abigail Adams Affairs which focuses on Abigail Adams’s epistolary flirtations with men, including most notably Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, and James Lovell, The Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the Continental Congress, while her husband John Adams was absent serving the country.
erkkila@northwestern.edu