Other honors included The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1995 and the 2001 Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, which she received along with W. G. Sebald and Markus Werner.
Much of W. G. Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn describes a walking tour that roughly follows the Suffolk Coast Path.
In addition to seminars on early cinema, on Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Elsaesser also initiated a course on the cinema of the Weimar Republic, which he co-taught with his colleague W.G. Sebald.
A Member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt), she has written extensively on post-war German literature, including on such authors as Alfred Andersch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jurek Becker, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, W. G. Sebald, and Peter Weiss.