Elizabeth Renker is the author of the forthcoming Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1911 (Oxford UP, 2018); The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge, 2007); and Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Johns Hopkins, 1996), and the editor of Poems: A Concise Anthology (Broadview Press, 2016).  She is also the author of articles on US culture and poetics, particularly in the era after the Civil War; American literary realism; the curricular history of “American literature”; the disciplinary history of “English” and its canons; Herman Melville; American women poets; and teaching poetry. Professor Renker is the recipient of many teaching awards, indeed too numerous to mention. The Princeton Review named her one of the top 300 professors in the nation, across all universities and disciplines in 2012.