Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She holds the Walter M. Cabot Professorship of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her academic interests include the Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and the Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science, and the Law. Before her tenure at Harvard, she was a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Scarry is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Her seminal work, *The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World* (1985), is a foundational text in the study of pain and its role in human experience and societal structures. In it, she posits that while physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the world, human creation conversely leads to the making of the world. In 1998, she delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values with her essay 'On Beauty and Being Just,' exploring the disparagement of beauty in 20th-century Western civilization. Her 1999 book, *Dreaming by the Book*, garnered her the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. More recently, in 2014, she published *Thermonuclear Monarchy*, which examines the political implications of limiting control over nuclear weapons to a select few, particularly the monarchical power vested in a single leader.