Scott Michaelsen

C701 Wells Hall
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824

FacultyEnglishFilm Studies

Professor
Literary Studies; Race and Ethnic Studies

Biography

Scott Michaelsen teaches in a number of different areas, including American literature, the literatures of the Americas, popular culture (science fiction and weird fiction, for example), and philosophy and theory in its relation to literature and society.

Since 2000, he has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of CR: The New Centennial Review with David E. Johnson (University at Buffalo), a journal devoted to interdisciplinary, theoretical studies regarding the Americas. He also is the co-editor with Johnson of the book series, “Literature. . . in Theory,” published by the State University of New York Press.

Michaelsen has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He and Johnson won the prestigious Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement, given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, for their work on CR. He also is the recipient of the Rosenberg Teaching Award from the Department of English at MSU in 2005, and the English graduate student award for teacher of the year in 2017.

Projects

Project 0: Not For Sale No More: Live Music in the 80s (collected live music criticism from The Chicago Reader, 1983-87) (unassembled)

Project 1: Gumby: the Autobiography of the World’s Favorite Clayboy (Harmony, 1986) (co-authored with Louis Kaplan)

Project 2: TAP; Or, the Book of Quotes (1987) (a joint autobiography, co-authored with Louis Kaplan) (unpublished)

Project 3: Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader (Harmony, 1989)

Project 4: Mark Twain’s Capitalism: Capitalists and Aspirants, 1865-1909 (1992; Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY at Buffalo, Department of English)

Project 5: Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minnesota, 1997) (co-edited with David E. Johnson)

Project 6: The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (Minnesota,1999)

Project A: CR: The New Centennial Review (co-edited with David E. Johnson) (MSU Press, 2000-present)

Project 7: Your Songs; Or, The (Devil’s) Traxionary (2001-present) (co-authored with Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu)

Project 8: What Is To Be Done?: Essays on Sovereignty after 9/11 (2002-2007)

Co-authored with Scott Cutler Shershow; published as eight or nine separate essays in such places as Discourse, boundary 2, Theory and Event, Peace Review, Postmodern Culture, Aztlán