John Michael
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University
Professor, English and Visual and Cultural Studies
Co-Chair, The Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, 2003-2004

jnml@troi.cc.rochester.edu

Interests: nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, critical theory, and cultural studies; problematics of national identities in American literature and culture; contemporary relations between academic intellectuals and democratic politics; the complex interrelations between the reading of literature, the demands of ethics, and the problems of historical knowledge.

Publications
Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectual
Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: the Cipher of the World
Articles on intellectuals and terrorism, globalization and politics, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, neo-pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, Eastern Europe, Stephen Hawking.
Current book project is "Ahab's Crew: Obsession, Democracy, the American Subject from Jefferson to the War on Terror".

Graduate Courses
ENG 540 Nineteenth-Century American Literature
ENG 552 Aesthetics, Identification and Power
ENG 543 American Cosmopolitanism