 Elam went to Kenyon College in 1980, and graduated from Brown University with a Masters of Arts in 1984 and received her Doctor of Philosophy from Brown as well in 1988.Elam was also professor of English literature and critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University in Wales, at Indiana University in Bloomington in the 1990s, and at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.Before his death in an airplane crash in 1994, she was married to fellow academic Bill Readings, a professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal.