Martin Elsky is Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Literature, and Global Early Modern Studies at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. His fields of interest are Early Modern British and European literature and the history of criticism, especially German literary criticism in the circle of Erich Auerbach. He has served as Articles Editor of Renaissance Quarterly; as director of the Renaissance Studies Program (now the Global Early Modern Studies Program) at the CUNY Graduate Center; on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America; on the Central Executive Committee and Program Committee of the Folger Institute (Folger Shakespeare Library); and on the Advisory Boards of Etudes Epistèmé (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3) and Savoirs en Prisme (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne). He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Center for Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
His current interest centers around religion, culture, and Dante reception in the work of Erich Auerbach. He has published articles on Auerbach and Catholicism, liberal Protestantism, cultural identity, cultural geography, and the history of emotions. Most recently he has published “Erich Auerbach’s Figural Interpretation and the Uncanny Jew” (New German Critique 52.1, Feb 2025). He is currently at work on Auerbach’s concept of world history, biblical translocation, and Max Weber’s and Hannah Arendt’s concept of Jewry as a “pariah people.” Future projects include the genesis of Auerbach’s figuralism in the theological response of his Marburg colleagues to the Aryan Paragraph (1933), which decreed the expulsion of Jews from German universities. Relatedly, he has published on the German reception and memorialization of Dante in the wake of World War I, typological criticism in the US during and after World War II, and the migration of Dante across cultural and religious lines in Germany. He has translated the work of Erich Auerbach, including a selection of his letters (with Robert Stein and Martin Vialon).
He has published on George Herbert, John Donne, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and John Milton, and on topics such as seventeenth-century devotional poetry, Renaissance Humanist language theory, Early Modern print culture, the history of science, and the struggle between local and national culture in seventeenth-century English poetry.
He has developed courses on Early Modern trans-Atlantic literature and art; Renaissance architecture and literature; translation, appropriation, and imitation; the debate about historical philology; memory and philology in Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin; and memory in the modern English, German, and European novel. He has organized and co-organized colloquia and conference panels on German criticism (especially related to Erich Auerbach) and cross-disciplinary Early Modern topics, including “Erich Auerbach: Scholarship & Cultural Identity in Times of Crisis” (Webinar in collaboration with the University of Oldenburg, Germany); “Reappraising Auerbach’s Contexts: A Conference on the 50th Anniversary of Erich Auerbach’s Death” (in collaboration with the University of California-Irvine and the Zentrum für Kultur- und Literaturforschung Berlin); ““Dante Politico: Dante in Twentieth-Century Political Turmoil”; “Worlds Apart: Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire” (in collaboration with New York University), “Early Modern Trans-Atlantic Encounters: England Spain and the Americas” (in collaboration with the Spanish Institute and the New-York Historical Society). For the Center for Jewish Studies, he has co-organized “Critical Theory, Jewishness, and Antisemitism” and “New Work in Yiddish Studies: Yiddish on the Left and in Vilna.”
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