Carolyn Betensky

Assistant Professor of English
Undergraduate Academic Advisor

Ph.D. Columbia University, Comparative Literature
M.A. Columbia University
B.A. Barnard College

Office: 114B Independence Hall
Phone: 401-874-7437
E-Mail: betensky@mail.uri.edu
Office Hours: Mon and Thur 11:00 - 1:00 pm and by appt.

Carolyn Betensky confesses to being in this business so that she can teach and write about things that make her uncomfortable. Although she is really pretty happy most of the time, she has spent most of her academic career thinking about such topics as guilt, disgust, and procrastination, and she writes regularly on the insidiousness of officially uplifting cultural phenomena. Betensky loves to work with British nineteenth-century texts because of their explicit renderings of certain awkward cultural negotiations and fantasies that remain very much with us today.

Betensky's articles on slippery ideological operations in Victorian and contemporary culture have appeared in Novel, Cultural Critique, and the Henry James Review, and she has contributed essays to books on Pierre Bourdieu and George Sand. Along with the essays on Bourdieu and Sand, her translation of Bourdieu's “The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World” in the journal Telos reminds her of her brief former life as a French professor. Currently, she is hard at work on a book entitled Bourgeois Compassion: the Cultural Work of Emotion in the Victorian Social-Problem Novel.