Elizabeth Schambelan

Elizabeth Schambelan is working on a book of linked essays about masculinity, fraternity culture, and feminism. Her work is provocative, riveting, and necessary. Plucked from the tabloids as well as deeply researched, her subject matter is difficult and visceral but never sensationalistic as she unearths the historical underpinnings and the social construction of masculinity and interrogates current fraternity culture. She says, “I’ve been working on this project, an investigation of the violence committed in the name of male privilege, since 2014. I’ve been writing not only about the violence itself, but also about the myths we use to reconcile ourselves to it, and about the denial and erasure that silences those who experience it. I’m as invested as any novelist in the aesthetic and emotional possibilities of language. But I’m also trying to synthesize research and communicate knowledge for explicitly political ends.” Several essays from this work in progress have been published in n+1. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Bookforum.

 

Schambelan received her B.A. from Oberlin College and is the deputy editor of Artforum. She plans to take a sabbatical from the magazine to focus on completing this book. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.