Michael A. Elliott

Elliott most recently served as the chief academic and executive officer of Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences, the university’s core undergraduate division and home of the liberal arts, since May 2016. The college comprises more than 35 academic departments, 570 full-time faculty, and approximately 5,500 students.

The Charles Howard Candler Professor of English at Emory, Elliott is a scholar of American literature and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to authoring two books related to American literary and intellectual history, he has received several prestigious research fellowships. His acclaimed Custerology (University of Chicago Press, 2007) explores how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s violent past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present. The late Larry McMurtry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, called Custerology “vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important.” Elliott also serves on the editorial board of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and has co-edited two other books, as well as numerous articles and book chapters in scholarly publications.

He has held fellowships at Yale’s Beinecke Library, Harvard’s Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He has also advanced research in the humanities through a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development and publication of digital monographs.

He earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Amherst College in 1992 with a dual major in English and Russian. Elliott completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1998 with distinction in English and comparative literature. After joining Emory as assistant professor of English and director of graduate studies in the English department in 2004, he rose to professor of English and American studies in 2009. At Emory, Elliott has served in several other key administrative roles, including as faculty associate in the School of Graduate Studies (2007-09), followed by senior associate dean of faculty (2009-14), and executive associate dean (2014-15) and interim dean (2016-17) in the College of Arts and Sciences. He was then named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences after a national search.