Michael Bérubé

Michael Bérubé (born 1961) is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education. He was the 2012 president of the Modern Language Association, and served as vice president from 2010-2011. He also served on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors from 2005 to 2011, and now sits on the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Bérubé was named a University Scholar for research at University of Illinois in 1995 and was awarded the Faculty Scholar medal for research from Penn State in 2012.

Life, education and career

Son of Maurice Berube, Eminent Scholar at Old Dominion University, Bérubé was born and grew up in New York City. He attended Regis High School. He received a B.A. in English from Columbia University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, where he studied from 1983 to 1989. Bérubé held a professorship in the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1989 to 2001, where he was affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Afro-American Studies and Research Program. In 2001 he moved to Penn State for the then newly-created Paterno Family Professorship in Literature, which he resigned in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

Bérubé edits "Cultural Front", the New York University Press series which published his 2009 book The Left at War. He maintained a personal blog from 2004-2010 and wrote for Crooked Timber from 2007-2012.

Publications and achievements

Bérubé drew attention in the early 1990s for his essays in the Village Voice and Village Voice Literary Supplement (VLS), which dealt with (among other things) political correctness, postmodernism, and cultural studies. In 1994 he published an essay in Harper’s Magazine, "Life As We Know It: A Father, A Son, and Genetic Destiny", about his son Jamie, who has Down syndrome, and in 1995 a review essay in The New Yorker on contemporary black intellectuals; these essays, particularly the latter, drew a wide array of energetic and often contentious responses. Some of the VLS essays were revised and republished in Bérubé’s second book, Public Access (1994). Since then, Bérubé has continued to write for newspapers and magazines, including Dissent, the Nation, the New York Times(and New York Times Magazine), the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. Since 1997 he has also been a contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bérubé's third book, Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child, was published in 1996. Following a positive review by Beverly Lowry, Life As We Know It was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; it was also named as one of the best books of the year by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio. It is an expanded account of Jamie's first four years, as well as a discussion of disability rights, abortion and prenatal testing, early intervention programs, early childhood language acquisition, school policy, and theories of justice.

In 2005-06, Bérubé emerged as a critic of David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights"; an account of that campaign, together with a description of Bérubé's pedagogy in undergraduate classes, makes up most of Bérubé’s fifth book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (2006). Bérubé also published a number of essays critical of figures on the antiwar left and their response to the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, though he said he opposed the Iraq war; the argument was elaborated in his seventh book, The Left At War, published in 2009.

Bérubé lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with wife Janet Lyon. Together they have two sons, Nick and Jamie.

Books

• The Left at War (2009)
• Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (2006)
• What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (2006)
• The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998)
• Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996)
• Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994)
• Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992)

Edited books

• Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1995) (with Cary Nelson)
• The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2004)

External links

• Michael Bérubé's faculty page at Penn State University
• Michael Bérubé's website, with blog archive
• Michael Bérubé's blog archive at Crooked Timber