Cindy Weinstein
Cindy Weinstein
Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English
Profile
Cindy Weinstein's work is informed by the notion that literature and the interpretive tools of literary criticism contribute to an understanding of the world outside of literature. Each of her three monographs appears in Cambridge University Press's prestigious Studies in American Literature and Culture Series, and examines the sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent relation between literary and cultural representations of particular themes. Her first book analyzed this dynamic with respect to labor; her second focused on family; and her third on temporality. Taken together, these books cover a range of canonical and non-canonical authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to E.D.E.N. Southworth and Caroline Lee Hentz. In addition to writing these monographs on American literature, which take up literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she has edited and co-edited volumes on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, twentieth-century American fiction, aesthetics, and temporality. Weinstein's articles have appeared in top journals in literary criticism, including American Literature, ELH, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.
Her book, Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain written with Dr. Bruce Miller, is a prize-winning memoir about her life as an English professor and daughter whose father suffered from early-onset Alzheimer's. She received a fellowship from the Global Brain Health Institute at UC San Francisco for this project, and she spent a year taking classes on neurology, attending seminars on caregiving, and shadowing physicians, during which time she also studied the memoir genre.
She is currently working on a book called "Always Nevermore: The Unending Death of Edgar Allan Poe," which analyzes the profound influence Poe's work has had on novelists, painters, and poets. And she is writing a second memoir, "Essays in my Garden: A Memoir." Her essay on Poe and Nabokov appeared in Thomas M. Allen's edited volume, Time and Literature, and another essay on Poe and Magritte appeared in Poe Studies. She has begun the research for a third chapter about the influence of Poe on the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg.
- Paula Svonkin Creative Writing Prize for "Bamboo, Lexapro, and Reading," Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association, November 2025.
- 1921 American Literature Prize for "La Reproduction interdite: Magritte's Reproduction of Poe." Honorable Mention in the tenured professor category, 2022.
- Grand Prize from Memoir Magazine for Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain, 2022.
- UCSF Global Brain Health Initiative Atlantic Fellow (2018-19)
- Edgar Allan Poe Society
- Senior Atlantic Fellow in the Global Brain Health Initiative
Featured News
Selected Publications
Books
- Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain, with Bruce L. Miller, MD (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
- A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge University Pres, 2018).
- Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, co-edited with Robert S. Levine (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017).
- Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now? (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, co-edited and co-written introduction with Christopher Looby (Columbia University Press, 2012).
- The Concise Companion to American Literature, 1900-1950, co-edited and co-written introduction with Peter Stoneley (Blackwell Press, 2008), 1-16.
- Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, (Cambridge University Press, December 2004).
- The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, editor (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth Century American Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Articles and Essays
- "Not to be Reproduced: Magritte's Reproduction of Pym" (Poe Studies History, Theory, Interpretation, 2022)
- "Subjective Cognitive Decline and Elder Mistreatment in Mexican community-dwelling older adults," with Stefanie Piña-Escuero, José Alberto Avila-Funes, Anna Chodos, and Christine Ritchie, Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
- "Contextualizing Mistreatment in Cognitive Impairment in Latin America," with Stefanie Piña-Escudero and Christine Ritchie, Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect (February 2019): 1-7.
- "Time and the Return to Form: Reading Nabokov reading Poe" in Time and Literature" ed. Thomas M. Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).