Elisa Haf obtained her BA in Modern & Medieval Languages (Spanish and German) from The University of Cambridge, before going on to complete two Master's degrees: one in Critical International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and one in General & Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Since October 2023, she is a doctoral candidate in Literary Studies at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule, working at the "Temporal Communities" Cluster of Excellence, specifically within Research Area 1: "Competing Communities". Her research focuses on literary constructions of bisexuality, looking specifically at such constructions in Irish women's writing since the early nineties.

Current research includes an EXC 2020 doctoral research project, The Uses of Bisexuality: a Case-study of Irish Women's Writing since 1993 (2023–).