Modernism; Postcolonialism; Anglophone novel, drama, and poetry, spec. Irish, Caribbean, British literature; literary theory, cultural studies, petroculture & theories of energy transition; History of English, Global English literary criticism
Michael Malouf received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches courses on Anglophone literature with a special interest in the Modernist period as well as contemporary novels and poetry from Ireland, Britain, and the Caribbean. His research and teaching are informed by the historical approaches found in postcolonialism and cultural studies with a particular focus on questions of cross-cultural literary and material practices within a transnational conception of the literary field. His courses strive to examine historical and social questions such as modernity, migration, or the commodity through the lens of literary and cultural forms.
Professor Malouf is currently the Interim Director of the Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. If you have any questions about our PhD programs, feel free to email him or consult our program page for more information.
Coming out of a background in modernism and postcolonialism, my research interests are broadly concerned with the transnational circulation of ideas, commodities, and forms as mediated by circuits of empire and globalization from 1900 to the present. The latter interest is foregrounded in my current project on the future of energy as imagined within 21st century US cultures. Arising from a popular course on Oil and Culture that I have taught since arriving at Mason in 2005, my project, Transition Cultures, is concerned with how petroliterate cultures imagine and resist energy transition. Contributing to the field of Energy Humanities and Petroculture Studies, I examine media artifacts of petroculture as they are shaped by contested ideological visions of imagined post-oil futures. This book project surveys the field of Energy Transition through chapters on history, geopolitics, climate, the law, consumerism, technology, and temporality that provide an overview of the field for the general reader.
Book
Making World English: Literature, Late Empire, and English Language Teaching, 1919-39. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Articles
"The Poe Test: Global English and the Gold Bug." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 7:1 (January 2020): pp 35–49. DOI: 10.1017/pli.2019.23
“Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and Petroliteracy.” Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, Culture. Edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
“Shaw in Context: Empire and Nationalism.” Literature in Context: George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2015.
“Problems with Paradigms: Irish Comparativism and Casanova’s World Republic of Letters." New Hibernia Review 17:1 (Spring 2013): 48-66.
"Dissimilation and Federation: Irish and Caribbean Modernisms in Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin." Comparative American Studies 8.2 (2010):
"Transatlantic Fugue: Self and Solidarity in the Black and Green Atlantics." The Black and Green Atlantic. Ed. David Lloyd and Peter O'Neill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 149-64.
ENGL 408: Modernism
ENGL 465: British Novel after 1900
ENGH 455: Postcolonial Drama
ENGL 645: James Joyce's Ulysses
ENGL 645: Virginia Woolf
ENGL 439: Postcolonial Poetry
ENGL 439: Caribbean Literature
ENGL 458: COVID Cultures
ENGL 368: Modern Drama
ENGL 360, 202: Oil and Culture
ENGL 676: Introduction to Cultural Studies
ENGH 551: Introduction to Literary Theory
Ph.D., Columbia University, Department of English, 2004.
M.A., North Carolina State University, Department of English, 1996.
B.A., New York University, Gallatin Division, 1991.
Zachary Marschall, Forward to Heritage: The Future of the American and British Art Museum in their Communities (2019)
Marielle Barrow, Counter-Memory and Cultural Capital: The Arts as Sustainable Civic Practice in the Caribbean (2016)