Biography
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. In August 2013 he will become Head of the Department of English. From 2003-2009 he was Director of Illinois's Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.
He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College with Highest Honors in English and Linguistics and a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in Comparative Literature. He also studied at the Center for Film and Literary Criticism in Paris and in the Literature Program at Duke University.
Affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures. He is on the Editorial Board of the journals Memory Studies and Studies in American Jewish Literature, and has been a member of the International Academic Advisory Council of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2010-2013) and of the Advisory Group of the AHRC-funded project Translating Freedom (2011-2012).
Rothberg's academic work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, History and Theory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, and Polish. He has also published articles on current political issues in the online venue openDemocracy. His essay "Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice" won the 2013 Prize for Best Essay in Narrative from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the 2013 IPRH Prize for Faculty Research.
His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009). Four co-edited special issues are appearing in 2010-2011: Noeuds de Mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies, co-edited with Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman); Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies (Interventions, co-edited with Jodi A. Byrd); States of Welfare (Occasion, co-edited with Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Bruce Robbins); and Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory (Criticism, co-edited with Stef Craps).
Currently, Rothberg is writing a book with Yasemin Yildiz and Andrés Nader on the intersection between migration and the confrontation with National Socialism and the Holocaust in contemporary Germany. Their collaborative project has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies. A second book project in progress considers "implicated subjects" and the problem of distant suffering in literature, film, and theory.
He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College with Highest Honors in English and Linguistics and a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in Comparative Literature. He also studied at the Center for Film and Literary Criticism in Paris and in the Literature Program at Duke University.
Affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures. He is on the Editorial Board of the journals Memory Studies and Studies in American Jewish Literature, and has been a member of the International Academic Advisory Council of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2010-2013) and of the Advisory Group of the AHRC-funded project Translating Freedom (2011-2012).
Rothberg's academic work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, History and Theory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, and Polish. He has also published articles on current political issues in the online venue openDemocracy. His essay "Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice" won the 2013 Prize for Best Essay in Narrative from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the 2013 IPRH Prize for Faculty Research.
His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009). Four co-edited special issues are appearing in 2010-2011: Noeuds de Mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies, co-edited with Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman); Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies (Interventions, co-edited with Jodi A. Byrd); States of Welfare (Occasion, co-edited with Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Bruce Robbins); and Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory (Criticism, co-edited with Stef Craps).
Currently, Rothberg is writing a book with Yasemin Yildiz and Andrés Nader on the intersection between migration and the confrontation with National Socialism and the Holocaust in contemporary Germany. Their collaborative project has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies. A second book project in progress considers "implicated subjects" and the problem of distant suffering in literature, film, and theory.
