Benjamin A. Saltzman

Benjamin A. Saltzman is an expert in poetry and visual culture. His research and latest book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (University of Chicago Press, April 2026), taps into one of the most urgent issues of our time: the difficulty of navigating our moral economy of attention. He transforms our understanding of the ways we respond (or feel that we should respond) to the immense amount of suffering in the world, which contemporary media renders vivid, immediate, and seemingly endless. His research shows that, rather than necessarily a moral failure, the act of turning away is in fact a deeply human experience and is often essential to how we attend to others and the pains of the world.
 

Saltzman is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the College. He is also the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment, coeditor of the journal Modern Philology, and coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages. He is a dynamic speaker and award-winning teacher.  And his research has been supported by major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation.