I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English. I read English at Oxford and received my MPhil and PhD from Cambridge, spending a year of my doctorate at Princeton as a Procter Visiting Fellow in History. I was previously a Departmental Lecturer in English and American Literature, based at Worcester College.
I work on modern American literary and intellectual culture. My first book, The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction, was published by Manchester University Press in 2021. I am now working on two loosely related book projects. The first is a study of what I am calling the ‘minor midcentury American novel’, which offers a reconsideration of U.S. fiction from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, focussing on texts by a mix of well-known and overlooked writers, including Eleanor Clark, Ralph Ellison, Jean Stafford, and Lionel Trilling. The second – my Leverhulme project – is a larger work on the topic of modern literary failure, exploring what role writers’ rejected, neglected, and unfinished stories and novels can and should play in our understanding of the shape and course of literary history.
Faculty page: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-michael-kalisch#/
Selected Publications
- “Herzog in Venice: Richard Stern’s Stitch, Ezra Pound, and Jewish American Literary History”, Studies in the Novel, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Fall 2021), pp. 266-284.
- The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).
- “Postmodernism”, in Maggie McKinley (ed.), Philip Roth in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 174-183.
- “Turn Every Page”, Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (September 2019), pp. 273-282
