Michael G Malouf
Michael G Malouf
Professor
Modernism (Joyce and Woolf); Postcolonialism (spec. Ireland and Caribbean); Anglophone novel, drama, and poetry, spec. Irish, Caribbean, British literature; literary theory, cultural studies, petroculture & energy transition; theories of World Literature and Global English; Energy Law and Literature
Michael Malouf research and teaching covers a range of forms (fiction, poetry, drama, film, culture) and regions (World Anglophone, US) with a specialization in the Modernist literature from Ireland, Britain, and the Caribbean. His courses often examine historical and social questions such as modernity, migration, energy, global languages, and Covid through the lens of literary and cultural forms.
Professor Malouf is currently the Director of the Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. If you have any questions about our PhD programs, feel free to email him or consult our program page for more information.
Current Research
Coming out of a background in modernism and postcolonialism, my research interests are broadly concerned with the transnational circulation of ideas, commodities, and forms as mediated by circuits of empire and globalization from 1900 to the present. The latter interest is foregrounded in my current projects on the Energy Transition and Energy Law and Literature. Arising from a course on Oil and Culture that I have taught since arriving at Mason in 2005, these projects are concerned with how the energy transition is imagined and resisted in cultural and legal forms -- and how those are related.
Selected Publications
Book
Making World English: Literature, Late Empire, and English Language Teaching, 1919-39. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Articles
“Caribbean Modernism and Joe Cleary’s Modernism, Empire, and World Literature. Invited book forum essay for The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2025), 1-7. doi:10.1017/pli.2024.24
“Resources and Repertoires: Language in Irish Fiction After Globalization.” In Globalization and Irish Literary Studies, edited by Coílin Parsons. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 263-79.
"The Poe Test: Global English and the Gold Bug." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 7:1 (January 2020): pp 35–49. DOI: 10.1017/pli.2019.23
“Behind the Closet Door: Pixar and Petroliteracy.” Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, Culture. Edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
“Shaw in Context: Empire and Nationalism.” Literature in Context: George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2015.
“Problems with Paradigms: Irish Comparativism and Casanova’s World Republic of Letters." New Hibernia Review 17:1 (Spring 2013): 48-66.
"Dissimilation and Federation: Irish and Caribbean Modernisms in Walcott's The Sea at Dauphin." Comparative American Studies 8.2 (2010): 140-54.
"Transatlantic Fugue: Self and Solidarity in the Black and Green Atlantics." The Black and Green Atlantic. Ed. David Lloyd and Peter O'Neill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 149-64.
Expanded Publication List
Courses Taught
ENGL 408: Modernism
ENGL 465: British Novel after 1900
ENGH 455: Postcolonial Drama
ENGL 645: James Joyce's Ulysses
ENGL 645: Virginia Woolf
ENGL 439: Postcolonial Poetry
ENGL 439: Caribbean Literature
ENGL 458; 400: COVID Cultures
ENGL 368: Modern Drama
ENGL 360, 202: Oil and Culture
ENGL 676: Introduction to Cultural Studies
ENGH 551: Introduction to Literary Theory
ENGH 458: Energy Humanities
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University, Department of English, 2004.
M.A., North Carolina State University, Department of English, 1996.
B.A., New York University, Gallatin Division, 1991.
Dissertations Supervised
Zachary Marschall, Forward to Heritage: The Future of the American and British Art Museum in their Communities (2019)
Marielle Barrow, Counter-Memory and Cultural Capital: The Arts as Sustainable Civic Practice in the Caribbean (2016)