Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers. He teaches courses on many forms and phases of American and Anglophone literature of the modern period. His teaching and research interests also include Animal Studies, Cinema and New Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007), co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer's L'homme ordinaire du cinéma [The Ordinary Man of Cinema] (MIT Press, 2016), and author of dozens of essays, articles, poems, and translations in journals including American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Grand, Modern Language Quarterly, Oxford Literary Review, Philosophical Salon, Politics/Letters, PMLA, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry. He is the founding editor of the blog, Psyche on Campus, which has an international readership of over 17,000 teachers, clinicians, and students and was the winner of the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is also the editor  of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024). Two new books are forthcoming in 2025: Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge) and Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (Punctum), and he is currently finishing a new scholarly monograph called Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography from Nehemiah to Knausgaard (under contract with Columbia University Press). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Science History Institute, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, Cornell's Society for the Humanities, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Austen Riggs Center. He is Co-director of Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program, a founding member of the Historical Poetics group, a member of the Advisory and Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a consortium member of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, a member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn's Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.