Max Cavitch is a writer, teacher, and photographer who lives and works in Philadelphia. He is Associate Professor of English and Co-director of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also edits the award-winning blog, Psyche on Campus. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) and of several dozen articles and essays—both scholarly and public-facing—on topics in literature, cinema, the environmental, poetry and poetics, and psychoanalysis. He is also the editor of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Oxford, 2023), co-editor (with historian Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke, 2024), and co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT, 2016). He has three forthcoming books under contract: Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (Punctum, 2025), Psychoanalysis and the University (Routledge, 2025), and Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography from Nehemiah to Knausgård (Columbia, 2026). In addition, his journalism, poems, aphorisms, translations, and photographs have been published in journals including Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, Brittle Star, Denver Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Grand, the Journal of Wild Culture, New Associations, Pennine Platform, Philosophical Salon, Phoebe, Politics/Letters Live, Raven Review, Stone of Madness, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Wild Word. His most recent grants and prizes include the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association, a Beckman Center Fellowship from Philadelphia’s Science History Institute (4/1 – 5/31, 2024), and an Emily Harvey Foundation Writing Residency in Venice, Italy (6/24 – 7/29, 2024); also, from February through July 2025, he will be the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer at Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum and the University of Vienna.
