Michael Sawyer
- Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Michael Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature & Culture, a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. He is also the Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies and Electus Faculty Fellow in the David C. Frederick Honors College. His work endeavors to render inoperable the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, theory, literary critique, and aesthetics. He has published two monographs, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave:2018) and Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020). He has begun work on two new book projects. The first, The Door of No Return: A Phenomenology of Blackness, endeavors to articulate a theory of the Black subject that reaches beyond the limitations of the notion of anti-Blackness as an irreducible and omnipresent feature of the world as we know it. The second, Sir Lewis, is a trade biography of the Afro-British Formula One driver, Lewis Hamilton. He is the co-editor of The Journal of French and Francophone Studies and a member of the editorial boards of Critical Times and Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon and the PMLA Advisory Committee. Michael is in the third year of an immersive media residency at ONX Studios in New York City and Athens, Greece supported by the Onassis Foundation.
Education & Training
- United States Naval Academy, Bachelor of Science (Political Science)
- University of Chicago, MA (Committee on International Relations)
- Brown University, MA (Comparative Literature)
- Brown University, PhD (Africana Studies)
Representative Publications
Books in Press
- An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis Palgrave Press (ISBN 978-3319985749 Nominated for the First Book Award by the American Philosophical Associationand the MLA October 2018
- Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (ISBN 978-0745340746) Pluto Press March 2020
- Black Minded The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X
- An Africana Philosophy of Temporality Homo Liminalis
Books in Preparation
- The Door of No Return: A Phenomenology of Black(ness)
- Check Point-Lima (Under Review) Literary Fiction
- If Holden Caulfield Was Black (Literary Fiction)
Single-Authored Articles/Reviews/Chapters in Press
- “Shattering Perspectives” a review of a Teaching Collection of African Ceramics installed at Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University African Arts Journal (Forthcoming)
- “Crépuscle with RA Judy: A Review of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black” New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics (Forthcoming)
- Book Review: “Peniel Joseph’s The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.” American Political Thought
- “Post-Truth, Social Media, and the ‘Real’ as Phantasm” chapter in the volume Relativism and Post-Truth in Contemporary Society: Possibilities and Challenges edited by Steve Fuller, Mikael Stenmark, and Ulf Zackariasson Palgrave Press (ISBN 978- 3319965581) September 2018
- “Temporalità radicale, realismo fittizio e rivoluzione come contesto” Filosofia politica. 3 Dec 2017. ISBN: 0394-7297. Pp. 445-458
- “Undoing the Phaedrus: Melville’s Re-Reading of Plato” The C.L.R. James Journal November 2017 ISBN: 2167-4256
- “Two Silenced Instruments” Front Row Center: Photography by Larry Hulst. Exhibition Catalog: Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs: 2017
- “Sacrifice” Political Concepts,October 2015
- Book Review: Archipelago: A Novel by, Monique Roffey Small Axe Salon: 15, Fall 2015
- “Critical Intervention/Review of Keith Sandiford, Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean- Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah” The C.L.R. James Journal 20:1, Fall 2014 (pp. 17-24)
Book Chapters/Articles in Preparation or Under Review
- “Melville’s Meditation on the Long Shipwreck of the Middle Passage” book chapter in Companion to Melville edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge, Wiley Blackwell (Forthcoming Fall 2021)
Research Interests
Africana Political Thought and Philosophy; Post-Colonial Studies; Critical Race Theory; Political Theory; Political Philosophy; Naval History and Tactics; Revolt, Revolution & Rebellion; Literary Theory & Criticism; History of the American, French, & Haitian Revolutions; Slavery; Mass Incarceration; Creative Writing; African American Music: The Italian Renaissance
