Department of English — John Michael

Recent Publications

In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson's antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass's long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory. More info...

In Anxious Intellects John Michael discusses how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual's role in a pluralized society, weighing intellectual authority against public democracy, universal against particularistic standards, and criticism against the respect of popular movements. Michael asserts that these Enlightenment-born issues, although not "resolvable," are the very grounds from which real intellectual work must proceed. More info...

John Michael (CV)

Professor of English and Visual and Cultural Studies
PhD The Johns Hopkins University

john.michael@rochester.edu
(585) 275-9257, 424A Morey Hall

American literature, critical theory, and cultural studies

Research/Writing interests

John Michael's research interests include contemporary relations between academic intellectuals and popular politics, the problematics of national identity in American literary romances and films, and the complex interrelations between the interpretation of literature and the reading of history.

Recent publications

Identity and the Failure of America from Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror, University of Minnesota 2008
Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values, Duke 2000
Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World, Johns Hopkins 1988
"Profiles in Courage, JFK's Books for Boys," in American Literary History (5 July 2012)
“The Presence of Immigrants, or Why Mexicans and Arabs Look Alike,” in Making Sense of Presence: Philosophy, History and Politics, spec. issue of Storia della Storiographia 55 (2009), 144-58
“Liberal Justice and Particular Identity: Cavell, Emerson, Rawls,” in Arizona Quarterly 64.1 (2008), 27-47
“Identity, Masochism, and the Democratic Intellectual in the War on Terror,” in Intellectuals and Public Responsibility, spec. issue of The Hedgehog Review (2007), 71-80
Review: George Snedeker, The Politics of Critical Theory: Language/Discourse/Society, in Socialism and Democracy 19.1 (2005)
“Beyond Us and Them: Identity and Terror from an Arab-American’s Perspective,” in Palestine America, spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 102.4 (2003), 701-28

Forthcoming

“Death, Love, and Emerson’s Poetry"

Work in progress

Modern Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America: Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and Death

Teaching

John Michael's teaching interests span the corpus of American literature, the questions of aesthetics, and the demands of worldly criticism and critical theory in a situation that has been global for a very long time.

Recent undergraduate courses

Art and Media in Criticism and Culture (fall 2012)
Poe, Whitman, Dickinson (spring 2012)
Survey of American Literature (fall 2011)
American Realists (spring 2011)
Studies in Translation (fall 2008)

Recent graduate courses

Aesthetics and Ethics (spring 2013)
Nineteenth-Century American Literature (fall 2010)
American Cosmopolitanism (spring 2009)

Honors and activities

Presidential Fellow, Salzburg Seminars, Salzburg, Austria, 1993
Fulbright Lecturing Award, Instytut Anglistyki, Uniwersytet warszawski, Poland, 1990-91
CIES Fellowship, Summer Polish Institute, University of Pittsburgh, 1990
Junior Faculty Research Fellowship, University of Rochester, 1989
William B. Kenan Teaching Fellowship for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching, The Johns Hopkins University, 1981-82 and 1982-83
Humanities Center Fellowship for Study in Paris, The Johns Hopkins University, 1980-81
Human Biology Fellowship, The Johns Hopkins University, 1979-80
Graduate Fellowship, The Johns Hopkins University, 1977-79
Advisory Board, Journal of Narrative Theory, 2000-present
Editorial Board, Telos, 1990-98
Steering Committee, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference, Rochester, 1994
Tenure and Promotion Referee for (most recently) Princeton University, University of Michigan, Georgia Technological Institute, New York University
Outside Reader, Westview Press, University of Minnesota Press, Harper Collins, University of Chicago Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, University of Oklahoma Press, PMLA