Dr Michael Kalisch

I read English at Oxford and received my MPhil and PhD from Cambridge, spending a year at Princeton as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. I taught at Oxford and held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship before taking up my lectureship at Bristol in 2024.

I work on modern and contemporary American literature. I’m particularly interested in connections between the history of the novel and the history of ideas; in the history of literary criticism in the United States, especially the New York Intellectuals; in psychoanalysis; in Jewish American writing; in neglected, minor, and ‘failed’ writers and literary forms.

I’ve written two monographs – The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (Manchester University Press, 2021) and The Midcentury Minor Novel: American Fiction, 1945-1965 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) – and edited a collection of essays on the work of novelist Benjamin Markovits (Routledge, 2024). Recent publications include an essay in American Literary History on Lionel Trilling's unfinished second novel.

I’m now beginning work on a third monograph, in the field of law and literature and with the working title, The Trials of Postwar American Writing.

I teach ‘American Revolutions’, ‘American Short Stories’, and ‘Literature 1900-Present’, and contribute to a range of MA units. I’m available for PhD supervision.