About

Max Cavitch is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who joined the faculty in 1999. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Rutgers. His teaching and research interests encompass American and Anglophone literature of the modern period, Psychoanalytic Studies, Animal Studies, Cinema and New Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Poetry and Poetics, and Gender and Sexuality studies. Cavitch is the author of several books, including 'American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman' and 'Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present,' with the latter published in 2025. He has contributed numerous essays, articles, poems, and translations to various scholarly journals. Additionally, he is the editor of Walt Whitman's 'Specimen Days,' and has co-edited and translated works related to early American studies and cinema. Cavitch is the founding editor of the blog 'Psyche on Campus,' which received the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. His forthcoming work includes 'Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance,' and he is completing two scholarly monographs on topics spanning autobiography, psychoanalysis, and animal studies. He has received grants and fellowships from multiple prestigious institutions and is actively involved in various academic programs and collaborations, including co-directing Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program and participating in the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Research topics

• History
• Literature
• Art
• Psychoanalysis
• Art history

Selected publications

• Nick Stock and Nick Peim, <i>The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy and Enjoyment</i>

  Psychoanalysis and History · 2026-04-01

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• Psychoanalysis and the University

  2025-02-28 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book charts the past and present vicissitudes of psychoanalysis’s relation to education and emphasizes on the necessity of its increased presence in university settings. Why can fewer and fewer people afford either time-intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy or a three- to four-year college education? Why have psychoanalytic teaching and research become so marginalized? Where and how does psychoanalysis retain a foothold in academia? In an era when the futures of both psychoanalysis and higher education seem evermore uncertain, Psychoanalysis and the University argues for the need to overcome existing precarities and mutual resistances and suggests ways in which their prospects for survival could be reciprocally enhanced. Each chapter surveys and interprets present conditions, while arguing the necessity of supporting and expanding psychoanalytic teaching and research at both the undergraduate and graduate levels Drawing on Cavitch’s deep understanding of both psychoanalysis and university settings, this is essential reading for psychoanalysts, university teachers and administrators, and all students interested in how augmented psychoanalytic education could enhance their understanding of the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychoanalysis and Education

  2025-02-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Psychoanalysis, the University, and the Professions

  2025-02-28

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• Introduction

  2025-02-28

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• Whistler’s Mothers: Painters, Models, and Uncanny Arrangements

  American imago · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: The hyper-iconicization, sentimental nationalization, and mass merchandizing of the portrait commonly referred to as “Whistler’s Mother” (1871) have made it difficult to see as anything but another simulacrum of itself. Yet when studied alongside James McNeill Whistler’s far less well known but startlingly similar portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1873) both paintings appear quite differently. This psychohistorical essay takes a fresh look at both the Carlyle portrait and its compositional model, reinterpreting one of the world’s most recognizable paintings and its first “reproduction” as a diptych of the uncanny.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Psychoanalysis Among the Disciplines

  2025-02-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Psychoanalysis and the Curriculum

  2025-02-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy

  2025-02-28

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• 1 Introduction: Situation Critical

  2024-03-28

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Frequent coauthors

• Brian Connolly

  3 shared

• Brian Connolly

  1 shared

• Jacques Derrida

  1 shared

• Safaa Fathy

  1 shared

Labs

• Max Cavitch LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Literatures in English

  Rutgers University

Awards & honors

• 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism, American Psychoanal…