Elizabeth Renker

Elizabeth Renker is an American literary scholar and professor of English at The Ohio State University, specializing in American literature of the long nineteenth century, particularly the Reconstruction and Gilded Age periods, poetics, Herman Melville, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt.[1][3][6] She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1991 and has authored key works including Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (1996), The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (2007), and Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900 (2018).[2][3][4] Renker has also edited Poems: A Concise Anthology (2016) and contributed extensively to the recovery and study of American poetry and cultural history.[2][4]