Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers.  He teaches all forms and phases of American literature from the beginnings of English contact and settlement to the present day.  His teaching and research interests also include gender and sexuality studies, historical poetics, and cinema.  His book American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has also published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Screen, and Victorian Poetry.  He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.  He is presently Associate Chair of the English Department, and he continues to serve on the Advisory and Executive Councils of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.