Forthcoming February 2027

Chaos and Cool
Barbara Rubin, Edie Sedgwick, and the Remaking of
Dylan and Warhol

Projects

Michael Millner’s most recent — “Kerouac’s Archive Fever at 100” — is available to subscribers of The Missouri Review and through Project Muse (or directly from the author through the contact link above). In the last few years, Millner has published essays on identity politics in contemporary American crime novels, on Jack London’s early experiments in film and other mass cultural media, on race and King Kong movies, and on the political economy of behavior economics. He has also constructed a digital mapping project about the uneven urban development of Lowell, Massachusetts, in relation to Boston. Some recent work on Dylan has appeared on the Brooklyn Rail, and The Spectator (US) named his review of Blake Gopnik’s Warhol one of the 10 best cultural pieces in the magazine from 2020. Millner is the author of the academic study Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere, and his work has appeared in various academic journals and mainstream publications including New Literary History, American Quarterly, ESQ, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Weekly Standard, and The Conversation. He is a member of the editorial board of ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. He is an affiliate faculty member of the Digital Media Program, the Race and Ethnicity Program, and Gender Studies at UMass Lowell.

Teaching

In recent years, Michael Millner has taught courses on post-WW2 Hollywood film, American satire, Dylan/Warhol, contemporary African American fiction, and post-‘68 Arabic fiction. The histories of American popular genres — like crime fiction, comedy, financial dramas — have been a particular interest in his teaching. Millner has often taught the English Department’s survey of American literature and the American Studies Program’s introductory course. His teaching is organized more around themes than periods, and he is dedicated to coaching students in how to be researchers in their community. He has recently written about his pedagogy of writing instruction in The Chronicle of Higher Education.