Amy J. Elias, PhD
Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor in English
Director
Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts
University of Tennessee
Monday, July 13, 2026
Price for buffet lunch is $15 (includes complientary parking in the hotel garage).
If you plan to eat, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. July 10.
If you choose not to eat, a charge of $7 will cover parking and event arrangements.
The formal meeting begins at 11:45 a.m.
As a professor of English specializing in literature and American postwar arts and culture, in this talk I recount my experience team-teaching a PhD course in Electrical Engineering. It outlines the background of the course and how I worked with an ORNL scientist and a UTK professor of Communications to create a multidisciplinary approach to technical education that was successful for advanced graduate students, most of whom had worked in research labs or industry.
This talk is about how the humanities can inform the sciences, providing historical and cultural insights into the history and ethics of scientific discovery.
Amy Elias earned tenure at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before moving to UTK in 2002. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Principal Investigator on two NEH grants since 2018, Elias is the author of numerous articles and book chapters as well as Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001).
She is a winner of the Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and she is editor or co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015), Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU, 2016), and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke, 2025), winner of Hyperallergic’s Best Books in Art History for 2025.
Elias is currently working on two books, one about authenticity and one about coal, dementia, and the non-narratable.
She was principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal (JHUP), which won three national publishing awards.
Since starting as Denbo Center director, Elias has increased internal and external funding, has redefined the Center’s staff structure and physical space, and has expanded programming regionally and nationally.
For more information on TSK and its meetings, please email TSK secretary, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call him at 865-679-9854.