Ellen J. Esrock, PhD

 

Ellen Esrock is a scholar/researcher who works at the intersection of science and the visual/verbal arts.  She holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University, St. Louis, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. In 2022 she retired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to pursue research full-time.

 

Esrock's current work, Touching Words and Images, under contract with Oxford University Press, explores multi-sensory experiences of participating in works of literature and visual art. Stepping off from the dominant concept used to analyze such encounters, Embodied Simulation, she introduces the concept of Transomatization. Esrock proposes that readers and viewers can intimately experience works by using a particular kind of touch-like, interoceptive form of attending that reshapes one's bodily boundaries, corporeality, and consciousness.

 

Her earlier book, The Reader's Eye (Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), was among the first to challenge the structuralist focus in literary study that devalued considerations of the reader's visual, mental imagery. Through interdisciplinary research involving the sciences and the literary arts, she argued for the cognitive and affective impact of visual imaging and the importance of integrating the reader's eye into the study of literature. 

 

Esrock has received a Harvard Mellon Faculty Fellowship (1986,) a Fellowship from The Italian Academy of Columbia University (2003), and Rensselaer's Jerome Fishbach Travel Grant (2009) for travel through China. Her courses include Women Writers, Visual Culture, The Human Mind in Fiction, and Approaches to Viewing Photography.