Nathan Gorelick

Nathan Gorelick teaches in the English Department and for the First-Year Experience program. His areas of expertise include British and Continental Literature from the Restoration through Romanticism, Enlightenment philosophy and ideology, literary theory, and clinical and critical psychoanalysis. Before joining the faculty at Barnard he was Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University, where he also directed the summer Study Abroad Program in London and was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Dean’s Scholarship Award and multiple grants for Engaged Learning in the Liberal Arts.

Professor Gorelick’s research takes place at the intersections of literature, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique. His first book, The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious (Northwestern University Press, 2024), reveals how eighteenth-century literature, particularly the novel, avowedly or implicitly subverts, resists, or otherwise confounds the most powerful and enduring political and philosophical formations of its time. His next book, Semiotics of Ruination, examines the end of the world—a literary theme, philosophical problem, and lived material reality—from trans-Atlantic slavery and the origins of modern colonialism to the increasingly catastrophized present. A third, long-term research project considers the history of the relation between psychedelic drugs and the Freudian field, as well as how this relation may be reinvented today. He has also published academic articles and book chapters on diverse topics including the psychology of ecological collapse, Continental philosophy, the Haitian Revolution, the unconscious foundations of Islamophobia, and contemporary Islamicate politics. And he is the editor of Provocations Journal, the companion publication to the Provocations book series from University of Nebraska Press.

He has completed the six-year cycle of the Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, Canada, and he is a Candidate in the Licensed Psychoanalysis Certificate Program at the Pulsion Institute. He is a member of the Executive Council for the Modern Language Association's Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.