Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Distinguished Professor of English and Co-founder and Co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. She teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, Atlantic theatre and performance, transatlantic print culture, and digital humanities. Her research focuses on literature, culture, and performance of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. 

In 2019-20 she is the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California where she is working on a book project titled Geographies of Reproduction or Ante-Oedipus: Gender and Racial Capitalism in Plantation Modernity. Focused on the eighteenth-century Caribbean, the book proposes that modern forms of racialized gender took shape from the geography of colonialism. 

Professor Dillon  is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) which won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004), which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. She is co-editor with Michael Drexler of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics  to the novel and performance in the early Atlantic world, and from zombies to Barbary pirates. She is the co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Women Writers Project and the Journal of Cultural Analytics. She has previously served on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and American Literature and the advisory board of PMLA. She is the founder of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, an award-winning crowd-sourced digital archive, and the co-founder and co-director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, an open access collection that engages with the digital decolonization of the archive.