Michael Moon (professor)
Michael Moon is an American literary academic. He received his Ph.D in 1989 from Johns Hopkins University for the thesis Whitman in revision : the politics of corporealilty and textuality in the first four editions of Leaves of grass [1] He has been a professor in the English department at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, United States. He currently works in interdisciplinary studies at Emory University. He previously taught at Duke University. His primary research focuses on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature and culture, including film, especially in relation to the history and theory of sexuality and of mass culture. He is currently writing about the work of so-called "Outsider" artist Henry Darger. He regularly teaches across a broad historical and theoretical range; graduate seminars in recent years have included "Nature and its Others", "Serial Practices, Serial Forms", and "Contesting the Culture Concept: Pragmatism, Ethnography, Early Film."
He is mentioned by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her memoir, A Dialogue on Love (2000), where she names him as a close friend and current living companion.
He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass and several essay-collections in the fields of Queer Theory and American Studies.
Publications
Books
- A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (1998)
Disseminating Whitman (Harvard University Press, 1991)
Darger's Resources (Duke University Press, 2012 forthcoming)