Branka Arsić
Associate Professor
Ph. D., University of Belgrade
American 19th Century Literature and Philosophy, 16th-18th Century Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Literature and Contemporary Theory
Humanities 341
442-4043
ba@albany.edu
Professor Arsic specializes in 19th Century American literature and culture, Early American literature, 16th to 18th century European philosophy (especially British), contemporary continental philosophy, and the philosophy of literature.
She is author of a book on Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener,” entitled Passive 
Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007), and of The Passive Eye, Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett) (Stanford UP, 2003). She is currently completing a book on Emerson called On Leaving: a Reading in Emerson, and is also working on a volume on early American thought called Of Stones and Loving, which will include essays on Mary Rowlandson, Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Jefferson.
She has published articles on, among others, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Edwards, Berkeley, Spinoza, Blanchot, Beckett and Deleuze, and on topics ranging from the question of passivity, the impersonal, pain and suffering, to theories of vision, photography, war and witnessing, and the ethics of leaving.
She teaches undergraduate courses on a range of topics in the areas of American literature, literary theory and criticism, as well as more specialized graduate offerings.
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