Biography

Michael Jonik is an internationally recognized researcher of authors, primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Edwards, Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson and James). Michael Jonik teaches contemporary American Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Sussex. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

Collaboration with the Institute of History of Representations and Ideas in Modernities (IHRIM)

Michael Jonik is one of the most active and prolific European scholars in the field of American Literature. He has published numerous studies of a wide range of American authors in the most prestigious journals and publishers (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, etc.) and has given guest lectures at numerous universities. He is one of the convenors of one of the major international research networks on nineteenth-century American literature, Branca (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).

His current research project, foreshadowed by some of his recent articles, is on Henry David Thoreau: Thoreau's Radical Ecologies: Philosophy, Politics, Collective Agency (accepted by University of Minnesota Press). His research has led him to participate in two colloquia on Thoreau organized at ENS de Lyon (in 2009 and 2017).

Michael Jonik's work naturally relates to the issues of the IHRIM laboratory. This invitation is all the more relevant for the laboratory since the United Kingdom is one of the first European poles of study on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Michael Jonik is an extremely active researcher of international stature, whose wide-ranging skills and innovative perspectives will surely stimulate the students and the scientific community of ENS de Lyon.
 

Photo credits: Ch. Delory - RFIEA