Bio
Michael Millner currently serves as the Nancy Donahue Professor of the Arts at UMass Lowell, where he is also a tenured professor of English and American Studies. His scholarship, writing, and teaching focus on American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, and his work appears in both academic and mainstream publications. He also serves as Director of The Jack and Stella Kerouac Center, which houses the most comprehensive collection of Kerouac material in the world. Michael Millner also curates historical museum exhibitions, most recently at the National Park in Lowell. Over the past few years he has taught courses on American satire, Hollywood film from the 1930s to the 1970s, contemporary African American fiction, and New York City in 1965. He served as the president of the New England American Studies Association, and, before arriving at UMass Lowell, he was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Millner lives in Cambridge, MA, with his dog, chickens, tree frog, finches, rabbits, and family — although perhaps not in that order.
Projects
Michael Millner’s most recent essay (2022) — “Kerouac’s Archive Fever at 100” — is available to subscribers of The Missouri Review and through Project Muse (or directly from the author through the contact link above). In the last few years, Millner has published essays on identity politics in contemporary American crime novels, on Jack London’s early experiments in film and other mass cultural media, on race and King Kong movies, and on the political economy of behavior economics. He has also constructed a digital mapping project about the uneven urban development of Lowell, Massachusetts, in relation to Boston. Some recent work on Dylan has appeared on the Brooklyn Rail, and The Spectator (US) named his review of Blake Gopnik’s Warhol one of the 10 best cultural pieces in the magazine from 2020. Millner is the author of the academic study Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere, and his work has appeared in various academic journals and mainstream publications including New Literary History, American Quarterly, ESQ, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Weekly Standard, and The Conversation. He is a member of the editorial board of ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. He is an affiliate faculty member of the Digital Media Program, the Race and Ethnicity Program, and Gender Studies at UMass Lowell.
Teaching
In recent years, Michael Millner has taught courses on post-WW2 Hollywood film, American satire, Dylan/Warhol, contemporary African American fiction, and post-‘68 Arabic fiction. The histories of American popular genres — like crime fiction, comedy, financial dramas — have been a particular interest in his teaching. Millner has often taught the English Department’s survey of American literature and the American Studies Program’s introductory course. His teaching is organized more around themes than periods, and he is dedicated to coaching students in how to be researchers in their community. He has recently written about his pedagogy of writing instruction in The Chronicle of Higher Education.