Born: 1948.

Education: University of California, Santa Barbara, BA, 1970; PhD, 1975.

Michaels was assistant professor (1974–77), professor (1987–2001), and chair of English Department (1998–2001), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; was assistant professor (1977–80), associate professor (1980–86), and professor (1986–87), University of California, Berkeley; and is professor of English (2001–) and head of department (2002–), University of Illinois, Chicago.

Michaels's work has generated a set of arguments and questions around 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.

Publications

The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (2015), The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006), The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004), Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995), and The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). Some of his influential articles are “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Ranciere and the Form of the Photograph” (2011); “Interview on Photography and Politics” (2011); “Meaning and Affect” (2012) (all on nonsite.org); and “The Beauty of a Social Problem,” The Brooklyn Rail (2011). Further essays have appeared in Structuralist Review, the Georgia Review, Representations, Paideuma, the San Diego Law Review, and New Literary History, as well as essay collections. He is a founding editor and regular contributor of nonsite.org.

Walter Benn Michaels was interviewed by Veeser at the MLA in Vancouver on January 11, 2015, and then again in his office at UIC in Chicago on July 28, 2015. The following text draws from both interviews.