Michael Berlin

Michael Berlin’s teaching and research focuses on Anglophone literatures before 1830, the Black Atlantic, and poetry & poetics.

Michael Berlin

Michael Berlin

Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program

Website

Education

  • Ph.D., Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

Research

  • Anglophone literature before 1830
  • The Black Atlantic
  • Comparative poetics
  • The history of literary theory and criticism

Teaching

  • English 394, “Removal and Romanticism,” Fall, 2025
  • English 232, “Novel Transformations,” Winter, 2025
  • English 292, “Gothic Geographies,” Winter, 2025
  • English 393, “Genres of the Atlantic,” Fall, 2024
  • English 295, “Currents of Romantic Revolution,” Spring, 2024
  • English 251, “Atlantic Worlds, Atlantic Violence,” Fall, 2023
  • Writing 100, “Writing as Learning and Unlearning,” Fall, 2023
  • English 392, “Metaphysical Poetics,” Winter, 2023
  • Writing 100, “Civil War,” Fall, 2022

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed Articles 

  • “’The Rock that was Smitten in the Wilderness’: Grace and the ‘System of Needs’ in Robert Wedderburn’s Radical Gospel,” “Reconceptualizing Religion in Early African American Literature,” eds. Donald Holmes and Kevin Pyon, Early American Studies (accepted).

  • "‘Oblivions Sable Shore’: Phillis Wheatley Peters at the Limits of Lyric History,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 64, No. 3-4 (Fall-Winter, 2023): 303-326.

  • “‘How the World Really Ends’: Adorno on Working Through Catastrophes to Come,” Cultural Critique 109 (Fall, 2020): 112-138

Book Reviews and Review Essays 

  • Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community by Joseph Albernaz, Comparative Literature Studies (accepted).

  • The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation by Lenora Hanson, Studies in Romanticism (Winter 2023): 541–552.

  • “Global Poetics: Reactive and Relational,” The Georgia Review 75, no. 4 (Winter, 2021).

  • “On Jay Wright’s The Prime Anniversary,” The Georgia Review 74, no. 2 (Summer, 2020).

Works in Progress

  • “Salvaging Enlightenment” (commissioned; revision submitted).

  • “Race, Fancy, and the Lyric’s ‘Soaring Fortunes’” (under revision).

Book Manuscript

  • “The Poetry of Origins: the Ode, Personhood, and the Rise of the Lyric.”

Book Chapters 

  • "The Middle Passage,” in Phillis Wheatley Peters in Context (accepted).

  • “Jay Wright,” in Twenty-First-Century African American Poets, vol. 392, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gale Literature.

Fellowships

  • Lenfest Grant for Summer Research, WLU, 2023; ‘24; ‘25.
  • Mellon–Council for European Studies Completion Fellowship, Columbia University, 2021-22.
  • Tierney Humanities Scholarship, UCI, Summer 2020.
  • Dorothy & Donald Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship, UCI, Winter & Spring quarters 2020.
  • William Andrews Clark Library Predoctoral Fellowship, UCLA, October 2019.
  • Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, August & September 2019.