Michael Warner

Michael Warner is the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies. On completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1986, he taught at Northwestern University and Rutgers and joined the Yale faculty in 2007.

His work ranges across a number of topics and styles, from scholarship in early American literature and print culture, to more theoretical writing about publics and social movements, to introductory editions and anthologies, to journalism and nonacademic political writing. In connection with his scholarship on print and the history of reading, he has been interested in several other disciplines, on topics such as new media, intellectual property, and secularism. He has also written extensively about sexuality, politics, and the public sphere. One common thread across these fields is the way different social worlds are built up out of different circulating media and ways of reading or hearing. At present he is working on two topics: the early history of evangelicalism in America, and climate change. The first project, based on the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography that he gave at Penn, is titled “The Evangelical Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America.” The second led to the 2018 Tanner Lectures on infrastructure, ethics, and the environment at UC Berkeley.

He is the author of numerous books including Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard, 2010);  Publics and Counterpublics (Zone Books, 2002); The Trouble with Normal (Free Press, 1999; Harvard, 2000); Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993); The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard, 1990). His edited works include The English Literatures of America (with M. Jehlen; Routledge, 1997). and Origins of Literary Studies in America (with G. Graff; Routledge, 1999).