Michael Warner

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies, and is currently chair of the English department.  His diverse interests include colonial and antebellum America, social theory, media studies, queer theory and politics. He is at work on a study of secularism, including both the theoretical understanding of secularism in the present and a historical inquiry into the development of secularism in America.   This project has led to two books currently in press.  One, based on a conference at Yale, is a collection of essays coedited with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, to be published by Harvard University Press in 2010 as Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.  The other, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is based on the Rosenbach lectures of 2009, and is to be titled The Evangelical Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America.  Among his earlier books are The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth–Century America (Harvard University Press, 1990); Publics and Counterpublics  (Zone Books, 2002); The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life  (The Free Press, 1999; Harvard Univ. Press, 2000); The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 2003); American Sermons (Library of America, 1999); Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory  (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and with Myra Jehlen, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800 (Routledge, 1997).