Michael Rothberg

Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative and a Conrad Humanities Scholar. From 2003-2009 he was Director of Illinois’s Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures.

Rothberg’s academic work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, History and Theory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, and Polish. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009). Currently, Rothberg is completing a book called The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators.