Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois


Michael Rothberg

Professor of English, Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Jewish Culture and Society, Comparative and World Literature, and Germanic Languages and Literatures

User Photo

Contact Information

Visit Website

Office Hours

  • On leave: Fall 2011/Spring 2012

Education

Swarthmore College, B.A. with Highest Honors in English and Linguistics; CUNY Graduate Center, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature

Courses

On leave: Fall 2011/Spring 2012

Research Interests

Critical Theory; Comparative Twentieth-Century Literatures; Holocaust Studies; Contemporary American Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Diasporas and Globalization; Theories of Trauma, Memory, and Justice

Selected Publications

Books

  • Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
  • Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics and the Profession. Ed. Peter Garrett and Michael Rothberg. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.
  • The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg. New Brunswick, NJ & Edinburgh, UK: Rutgers UP & Edinburgh UP, 2003.
  • Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Book Contributions

  • "Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies." The Oxford Handbook to Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
  • "Fractured Relations: The Multidirectional Holocaust Memory of Caryl Phillips." After Testimony: The Ethics of Holocaust Narrative. Ed. Jakob Lothe, James Phelan, and Susan Suleiman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2011. Forthcoming.
  • "Multidirectional Memory and the Universalization of the Holocaust." Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate. Ed. Jeffrey Alexander. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • "Writing Ruins: The Anachronistic Aesthetics of André Schwarz-Bart." After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture. Ed. Robert Ehrenreich and R. C. Spargo. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
  • "Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post-9/11 Literature." Literature After 9/11. Ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 123-42.
  • "Der Holocaust, Kolonialphantasien und der Israel-Palastina Konflikt: Multi-Direktionale Erinnerung." Zwischen Antisemitismus und Islamophobie: Vorurteile und Projektionen in Europa und Nahost. Ed. John Bunzl and Alexandra Senfft. Hamburg: VSA, 2008. 177-94.
  • "Roth and the Holocaust." The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed. Timothy Parrish. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 52-67.
  • "Construction Work: Theory, Migration, and Labor in an Age of Globalization." On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Caren Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 117-41.
  • "Pedagogy and the Politics of Memory: ‘The Countermonument Project.’." Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. Ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes. New York: MLA, 2004. 466-76.
  • Rothberg , Michael . "Le Coup de grâce as Male Fantasy: On the Sexual Politics of Fascism." Subversive Subjects: Rereading Marguerite Yourcenar. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004.
  • "’There Is No Poetry In This’: Writing, Trauma, and Home." Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 147-57.

Journal Articles

  • "Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice." Narrative (2012):
  • Byrd, Jodi A., and Michael Rothberg. "Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 1-12.
  • "From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory." Criticism (2011): forthcoming.
  • Goodlad, Lauren M., and Michael Rothberg. "Preface: States of Welfare." Occasion 2 (2011): online.
  • Rothberg, Michael, and Yasemin Yildiz. "Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany." Parallax 61 (2011):
  • "Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Noeuds de Mémoire." Yale French Studies (2010): 3-12.
  • "Quantifying Culture? A Response to Eric Slauter." American Literary History (2010): 341-46.
  • "After Apartheid, Beyond Filiation: Witnessing and the Work of Justice." Law and Literature 21.2 (2009): 275-90.
  • "In the Nazi Cinema: Race, Visuality, and Identification in Fanon and Klüger." Wasafiri 24.1 (2009): 13-20.
  • Druker, Joanthan , and Michael Rothberg. "A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi’s Place in American Holocaust Discourse." Shofar (2009): 104-26.
  • "A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray." American Literary History (2009):
  • "Entre Auschwitz et Algérie: Une mémoire multidirectionnelle." Témoigner entre Histoire et Mémoire (2009): 105-27.
  • "Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response." Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008): 224-34.
  • "Beyond Eichmann: Rethinking the Emergence of Holocaust Memory." History and Theory 46.1 (2007): 74-81.
  • "Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness." Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 158-84.
  • "Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels." American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 303-11.
  • "The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinéma Vérité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor." PMLA 119.5 (2004): 1231-46.
  • "Dead Letter Office: Conspiracy, Trauma, and Song of Solomon’s Posthumous Communication." African American Review 37.4 (2003): 501-16.
  • Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. "Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Towards an Ethics of the Borderlands." Symploke 11.1-2 (2003): 23-38.
  • Rothberg, Michael, and Jared Stark. "After the Witness: A Report from the Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale." History and Memory 15.1 (2003): 85-96.
  • "W.E.B. Du Bois in Warsaw: Holocaust Memory and the Color Line, 1949-1952." Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 169-89.
  • "After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe." New German Critique 72 (1997): 45-81.
  • "Documenting Barbarism: Yourcenar's Male Fantasies, Theweleit's Coup." Cultural Critique 29 (1995): 77-105.
  • "'We Were Talking Jewish': Art Spiegelman's Maus as 'Holocaust' Production." Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994): 661-87.
  • "Small Acts, Global Acts: Paul Gilroy's Transnationalism." Found Object 4 (1994): 17-26.

Special Issues of a Journal

  • Rothberg, Michael, and Jodi A. Byrd. Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies. Spec. iss. of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 1-94.
  • Goodlad, Lauren M., Bruce Robbins, and Michael Rothberg. States of Welfare. Spec. iss. of Occasion 2 (2011): online.
  • Craps, Stef, and Michael Rothberg. Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory. Spec. iss. of Criticism (2011): forthcoming.
  • Rothberg, Michael, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman. Noeuds de Mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture. Spec. iss. of Yale French Studies (2010): 1-241.

Works in Progress