About

Andrew Elfenbein is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. His research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, the history of authorship, queer theory, linguistics, and cognitive approaches to literacy. His current work emphasizes historical linguistics as a theoretical and practical challenge to governing paradigms in literary critical study. In collaboration with cognitive scientists, he has also engaged in extensive empirical research on reading to develop more sensitive models for literary criticism. Elfenbein has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the Howard Foundation, and was a Scholar of the College for the College of Liberal Arts from 2000 to 2003. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of British Studies and is on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals including Genders, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and boards related to Victorian and Romantic studies. His scholarly contributions include books such as 'Byron and the Victorians' and 'Romanticism and the Rise of English,' along with numerous articles and edited volumes that explore themes of gender, sexuality, cognition, and literary history within the context of Romantic and Victorian literature.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Cognitive psychology
• Philosophy
• World Wide Web
• Cognitive science
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Mary, the Cheeseburger-Eating Vegetarian: Do LLMs Recognize Incoherence in Narratives?

  2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Karin De Langis, Püren Öncel, Ryan Peters, Andrew Elfenbein, Laura Kristen Allen, Andreas Schramm, Dongyeop Kang. Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Strong Memory, Weak Control: An Empirical Study of Executive Functioning in LLMs

  2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Karin De Langis, Jong Inn Park, Khanh Chi Le, Andreas Schramm, Andrew Elfenbein, Michael C. Mensink, Dongyeop Kang. Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Strong Memory, Weak Control: An Empirical Study of Executive Functioning in LLMs

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-03

  preprintOpen access

  Working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind, is a critical component of human intelligence and executive functioning. It is correlated with performance on various cognitive tasks, including measures of fluid intelligence, which encompasses reasoning and problem solving. We use a comprehensive set of classic working memory tasks to estimate the working memory capacity of large language models (LLMs). We find that in most cases, LLMs exceed normative human scores. However, we do not find that the increased capacity of working memory is associated with higher performance on other executive functioning tasks or problem solving benchmarks. These results suggest that LLMs may have deficits in attentional control and cognitive flexibility, which result in difficulties with inhibiting automatic responses and adapting to shifting information. Our findings suggest that current reasoning models have mixed results in compensating for these deficits.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emmanuel Appadocca : Paternity in Trinidad and the Romantic Legacy

  Studies in the novel · 2025-05-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Michel Maxwell Philip's pioneering Trinidadian novel Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854) explores the relations of multiracial son to white father in the aftermath of the legal abolition of slavery. Philip reshapes the legacy of British Romanticism to underscore and criticize its treatment of race, especially in the work of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. Philip creates a novel that expresses the fury of a multiracial son at the racist neglect of his white father and dramatizes how colonialism continues to thwart the potential of Trinidad's multiracial population.

  PublisherDOI

• Byron’s Speed: <i>The Giaour</i>

  The Explicator · 2025-08-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How feelings matter for reading

  Leiden Repository (Leiden University) · 2025-12-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Byron: Gender and Sexuality

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides an overview of gender and sexuality in Byron. It situates the Byronic hero in the context of Regency understandings of masculinity and discusses Byronic sexuality in relation to the larger history of sexuality. In addition, it stresses the ways that Byron at times uses both race and disability to shape his representations of gender and sexuality. The main character of Lara provides an exemplar of the Byronic hero and is explored in terms of his ambiguity and power to draw attention to himself. Sardanapalus provides a contrasting case of a hero whose masculinity and connections to militarism prove to be self-defeating. Manfred and Don Juan reveal Byron’s interest in linking sexuality to mystery and unspeakability. In addition, The Bride of Abydos and Don Juan link sexuality to race in the figure of the African eunuch, whose behaviour is critical in protecting the hero from tyrannical rule.

  PublisherDOI

• Life Writing, Identity, and the Classroom: Perspectives from Social and Educational Psychology

  SubStance · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized backgrounds. As many of them have noted, they can feel expected to produce vulnerable versions of themselves on the page for the vicarious satisfaction of white audiences. Such satisfactions can become especially problematic in the classroom when life writing by one author is allowed to stand for the experience of an entire social group. This article details strategies for de-essentializing the use of life writing in the classroom by underscoring the complexities both of race and of the classroom reading experience.

  PublisherDOI

• Rhyme as resonance in poetry comprehension: An expert–novice study

  Memory & Cognition · 2021 · 7 citations

  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Linguistics

  Previous research has identified alliteration as a powerful device for investigating implicit memory effects. For example, alliterative phrases can provide retrieval cues that extend to a sublexical level and reactivate previous information that shares alliterative content (Lea et al., Psychological Science, 19[7], 709-716, 2008). But it is an open question if other surface forms might provide similar effects in line with these empirical findings, and in accord with writer intuitions. The present study examined whether rhyme produces analogous memory-reactivation effects, given the ubiquity of its use and endorsement of its power in a range of materials and experiences. We also examined whether the surface benefits attributed to rhyme might support anticipatory processes such as those traditionally examined with semantic content. In Experiment 1, participants exhibited faster recognition responses to previous poetic content as a function of rhyming cues. In Experiment 2, we recruited participants identified as experts on the study and use of rhyme, replicating the probe facilitations obtained in Experiment 1, but also revealing anticipations of imminent rhymes. The results are discussed in terms of implications for theories of memory-based text processing and of nonsemantic anticipatory processes during the reading of poetry, and perhaps for discourse experiences more generally.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas

  Victorian Studies · 2021-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth by Jayne Thomas Andrew Elfenbein (bio) Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, by Jayne Thomas; pp. vi + 210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $100.00. Scholars have often recognized William Wordsworth's importance for Alfred Tennyson. In Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth, Jayne Thomas addresses major issues in this relationship by focusing on familiar works: "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842), "Ulysses" (1842), In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850), Maud (1855), and "Tithonus" (1860). Her general approach [End Page 295] balances Harold Bloom's antagonistic understanding of influence against Christopher Ricks's more cooperative understanding of poetic allusion. Chapter 1 examines the 1832 "The Lady of Shalott" and its 1842 revision to describe Tennyson's impatience with what Arthur Henry Hallam called the poetry of sensation and Tennyson's revision of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" (1807) and "The Green Linnet" (1807), among others. In Thomas's view, Wordsworth enables Tennyson's "concerns between the demands of a poetry concerned purely with private experience and poetry that moves away from the self and engages with life, politics, and generalised humanity" (40). Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807) is perhaps the inevitable focus for a chapter on "Ulysses," stressing the lack in Tennyson's work of the compensations and recovery found in Wordsworth. In Memoriam A. H. H. may represent Tennyson at his most Wordsworthian, and Thomas argues that "echoes and allusions" in the poem "create a pattern of both independence from and dependence on Wordsworth, a desire for unity and filiation with the older poet, alongside a desire to re-engender and reinvent" (82). I found the chapter on Maud the least convincing, mostly because Tennyson's engagement with other authors in the poem seems so much more salient. "Tintern Abbey" (1798) (again, among others) is appropriately at the core of the discussion of "Tithonus," which "draws from the language of reflection" and "employs the language of sensation, thereby dissolving the arbitrary separation of the two forms of poetry" (166). Discussing influence in such poems, some of which are not obviously Wordsworthian, requires guidelines for understanding and evaluating it. As Thomas's title reveals, "echoing" is her core concept. Usually, for a piece of language to be the source of an echo, that language must be so distinctive as to have no other possible source. In the jargon of linguistics, such language is a low-frequency collocation, or a rare grouping of words. The echo of an earlier author in the work of a later author may appear at the level of just a single word. Yet the existence of the same word in two authors' works is not enough to prove an echo. Thomas claims that the Lady of Shalott's "glassy countenance" (24) echoes Wordsworth's "glassy sea" in his "Elegiac Stanzas" (25). Such a claim has to contend against other possible uses of "glassy" by Tennyson's precursors, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "glassy quiet" in Alastor (1816) (393), Lord Byron's "glassy gaze" in Parisina (1816) (334), or Felicia Hemans's frequent uses of the word glassy to describe bodies of water. Without acknowledging such competing possibilities or providing reasons for why a Wordsworth poem might be especially relevant to a given Tennyson poem, Thomas's treatment of echo sometimes feels murky. It also restricts her argument by hiding the broader intellectual and poetic stakes in Tennyson's originality: while he is indebted to so many other writers, he sounds like nobody else. The phrase "glassy countenance" is striking not because it revises Wordsworth but because it renovates a formulaic adjective by extending its reach. Before Tennyson, "glassy" described poetic bodies of water or, less often, the watery organ of the eyes. Tennyson unforgettably, and even creepily, extends what "glassy" and "countenance" might mean by turning the Lady's face into metaphoric glass, thereby stressing both its link to her magic mirror and its frozen fragility. I was also unsure that Thomas's opposition between Bloom's antagonistic theory of influence and Ricks's cooperative one worked successfully. Such an opposition is too likely to produce the conclusion that we see a little of both. A deeper engagement both [End...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Janet Todd

  7 shared

• Claudia L. Johnson

  4 shared

• R. Brooke Lea

  Macalester College

  4 shared

• Russell Swinburne Romine

  University of Kansas

  4 shared

• David N. Rapp

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Catherine M. Bohn-Gettler

  2 shared

• Emily Auerbach

  2 shared

• Aaron D. Mitchel

  Bucknell University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Choice Outstanding Academic Book for Byron and the Victorian…
• Choice Outstanding Academic Book for Romanticism and the Ris…
• McKnight Land Grant Professorship
• Graduate School Summer Faculty Fellowship (1993)
• Ruth Christie Distinguished Teacher Award (2000-2002)