Scholars’ Network Spotlight: Professor Max Cavitch
Max Cavitch, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Psychoanalytic Studies programme at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also edits the prize-winning blog, Psyche on Campus. He is also an Editorial Consultant for ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and a member of the Editorial Board of Revisit: Humanities and Medicine in Dialogue.
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.
Max’s most recent psychoanalytic publications include “Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form,” American Literary History 35.3 (2023); “Safe, But Not Too Safe: Scenes from an Epistolary Romance,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 58.2-3 (2022); “In the Interest of History,” History of the Present 12.1 (2022); and, forthcoming in American Imago, “Whistler’s Mothers: Painters, Models, and Uncanny Arrangements.” He is also the editor of the forthcoming special-topic issue of the journal Humanities on “Public Humanities from the Consulting Room to the Street: Politics, Scholarship, and Psychoanalysis.” Max’s forthcoming book Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present, charts the past and present vicissitudes of psychoanalysis’s relation to education and emphasizes on the necessity of its increased presence in university settings. Click here to learn more and receive a notification when the pre-order is available. Max is currently the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer at the Sigmund Freud Museum and the University of Vienna, where he is completing his new book, Fido and Psyche: Dogs in and around Psychoanalysis, 1871 to the Present: An Illustrated History. Later this year, he will be the “Jennifer Egan Creative Approaches to Mental Health Residential Fellow” at Mesa Refuge in northern California.
Max recently wrote for our Magazine New Associations in issue 44 about the blog he edits, Psyche on Campus, one of the most popular psychoanalytic blogs today. The article traces his work and the success of the blog. Max argues that the blog’s readers “recognise that it’s time for psychoanalysis and higher education to make common cause.” Read the full article by clicking here and visiting page 11.
