Michael Trask

I work at the intersection of social theory and traditional literary criticism.  Although I mainly teach and write on 20th-century American Literature, I also teach courses on 19th-century British literature (Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, the Victorian Triple-Decker).  I earned my Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins in 1998 and my B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1990.  My most recent book, Ideal Minds: Raising Consciousness in the Antisocial Seventies (Cornell UP, 2020), considers a variety of post-1970 social and intellectual trends and their literary resonances, including the ethical turn in political theory, animal liberation, deep ecology, and libertarianism.  I am currently writing a book  on 21st-century trends in literary criticism (thing theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, ecocriticism, posthumanism).  The book, titled "Unwelcome: When Literary Criticism Meets Philosophy," is a polemic that consists of three chapters each of which addresses critics' use of loan-words from philosophy (ethics, epistemology, and ontology) that I consider through the prism of three case studies (respectively, animal liberation, environmental humanities, and the new materialism).