Office: 100B English
Office Phone: 333-2581
Office Hours: Monday: 1 - 2
Thursday: 12:30 - 1:30
Email Michael
Michael Rothberg took over as Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory in August 2003. An Associate Professor of English, also affiliated with the Programs in Comparative and World Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg came to the University of Illinois in 2001. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he worked with Nancy K. Miller, and previously held a position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. While a graduate student he was a fellow of the CUNY Center for Cultural Studies and co-editor of their journal Found Object from 1992-1995. At Miami he was one of the co-founders of the Humanities Colloquium, an interdisciplinary program supported by the College of Arts and Sciences. Since coming to Illinois he has been active in Teachers for Peace and Justice and has co-organized the Working Group on Globalization and Empire with Matti Bunzl and Stephen Hartnett.
Rothberg’s teaching and research interests include critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary American literature. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and co-editor, with Neil Levi, of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2003), and with Peter Garrett, of Poetry, Politics, and the Profession: Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University (SUNY Press, forthcoming). He has recently contributed essays to the volumes Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (University of Illinois Press, 2002), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. Judith Greenberg (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), and On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization, ed. Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan (SUNY Press, 2005). In addition, he has published numerous articles in journals such as History and Memory, Cultural Critique, African American Review, and American Literary History on topics ranging from the writings of Toni Morrison and W.E.B. Du Bois to Holocaust video testimony and the sexual politics of fascism. He is currently completing a book entitled Multidirectional Memory: The Holocaust, Decolonization, and the Legacies of Violence. Selections from this book have appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism, PMLA, and Critical Inquiry.
