Ellen Esrock is an Associate Professor of Literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University (1984) and a B.A. in Philosophy from Washington University St. Louis (1972).  Professor Esrock teaches courses in modern and postmodern literature and visual art, psychology and literature, visual culture, women writers, and theory/history of photography. Working with graduate and undergraduate RPI students, she has completed several photo documentaries of Troy's YWCA.   

Esrock's first book is a translation of Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James Joyce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.)  In 1994 she published The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which was supported by a Harvard Mellon Faculty Fellowship. Currently she is working on Touching Art: Empathy and the Somatosensory System, for which she received a grant from the Italian Academy of Columbia University.   

Research Statement

My research explores how spectators and readers use their somatosensory/motor systems to create boundary changes that enhance their cognitive and affective experience of visual art and literature. To these ends I propose the concept of the transomatization, which operates in parallel to the notion of the simulation, as formulated in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.  The models of bodily spectatorship and reading that I am developing draw upon current scientific research in emotion, perception, language processing, and motor theories, as well as rich traditions of phenomenology and cultural histories of bodily empathy and imagination.  

Books

The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Translator.  The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Poetics of James Joyce by Umberto Eco.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.  

Selected Articles

"Embodying Art: The Spectator and the Inner Body." Poetics Today 31, 2 (2010): 217-250.
"Embodying Literature."  Journal of Consciousness Studies, Special Issue on Literature and the Brain1 1, 5-6 (2004): 79 –89.
"Touching Art: Intimacy, Embodiment, and the Somatosensory System." Consciousness and Emotion, 2, 2 (2001): 233-254.
"Visualization," in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge Press, 2005.
"The Princess and the Pea: Touch and the Private/Public Domains of Women's Knowledge." Knowledge and Society 12. Volume on Gender and Work. Stamford, Connecticut: JAQI Press Inc., 2000:17-29.

Interviews

"Interview with Northrop Frye" in Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Volume 24, edited by Jean O'Grady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
"The Inner Space of Reading: Interviews with John Hawkes, Carlos Fuentes, and William Gass."  Journal of Mental Imagery, 10 (1986): 61-68.

Grants/Awards

2009   Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute FishbachTravel Grant
2008   NSF funded Grant Reforming Advancement Processes through University Professions (Ramp-Up) through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
2003-4 Italian Academy for Advanced Study in America at Columbia University, NY, NY. Project on Art and the Neurosciences.
1986-7 Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.