Aaron Botwick is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College.

He received his Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY.

His monograph, The Dead Cannot Reply: Suicide in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Literature, is being published by Bloomsbury Academic on August 6, 2026. The book is an intellectual and literary history of the professionalization of suicidology at the turn of the twentieth century which shows that fiction played a significant role in the transformation of the debates on voluntary death.

In nineteenth-century England, the main point of contention around suicide was the punishment. Should "self-murderers" still be staked through the heart? Should the crown continue to seize their assets? In the twentieth century, the questions shifted to motives: Why does someone commit suicide? What does it feel like to be suicidal? And can these questions, asked about a subject who is no longer present, be answered without their testimony?

The Dead Cannot Reply combines close readings of major Victorian and modernist novels alongside popular and scientific texts on suicide to examine how questions of teleology, causality, and phenomenology were answered in the English imagination.

Aaron’s work has also been published in The D.H. Lawrence Review, The Harold Pinter Review, and Nabokov Studies.  In addition to modernism and suicide, his research interests include modern drama, Holocaust literature, and genre fiction.  He blogs about theater at scribicide.com.