Walter Benn Michaels

writer

Walter Benn Michaels is a literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004). Michaels' work has generated a set of arguments and questions around a host of issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, and meaning and intention in interpretation. Michaels was born in 1948. He earned his BA in 1970 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Afterwards, he taught at Johns Hopkins University (1974-1977, 1987-2001) and the University of California, Berkeley (1977-1987). Since 2001, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is well-known for his study of American Naturalism, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century, published in 1987. Michaels is a renowned teacher. His article "Against Theory," co-written with Steven Knapp, is included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. He is currently Professor in the Department of English, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he served as Head from 2001-2007.