McKeon, Michael

Michael McKeon
Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of English
Retired Since: 2021
McKean_CV_August_2023_.pdf
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Primary Areas of Specialization: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Book(s):

Historicizing the Enlightenment Volume 1

Historicizing the Enlightenment Volume 2

Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge

Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
Bio: Michael McKeon specializes in the history of literary and cultural forms. His approach to history takes in both the chronological or diachronic dimension of forms and their structural or synchronic relations to other formations—political, social, economic, cultural--with which they coexist at their respective diachronic moments. Within this broad methodological field, McKeon’s attention is concentrated on England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. McKeon has taught and written on a range of topics, among them the aesthetic, realism, disinterestedness, genre theory, narrative theory, parody, allegory and typology, romance and the novel, family romance, the picaresque, pastoral and pastoralism, sensibility, travel narratives, status and class, sex and gender, domestication and domesticity, pornography, patriarchalism, secularization, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, from feudalism to capitalism, periodization, the division of knowledge, science and literature, civil and religious liberty, the public and the private, the public sphere, libel and censorship, Marxism and literature, dialectical method, politics and poetry, tradition, print culture, virtual reality.
Education: PhD, Columbia University MA, Columbia University BA, University of Chicago

Other Departmental and University Positions

EmeritusDepartment Graduate Studies (DGS), director
School of Arts and Sciences Committee on Gender Equity, member
University British Studies Center (RBSC), co-founder; director
University Promotion Review Committee (PRC), member
University Search Committee for Executive Dean, member
University Committee on Academic Planning and Review (CAPR), member

Other Information of Interest

Visiting Professorships

Washington University, St. Louis, Fall, 1980
Brandeis University, 1986-1987
Princeton University, 1989-1990, Spring, 1991
Université de Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, Spring, 2008
Universidad de Granada, Spain, March: 2010-2013, 2015-2017
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, May, 2012
La Sapienza, Università di Roma, Fall, 2016

People

For Faculty

Emeritus Profiles