I research and teach twentieth and twenty-first century American culture, aesthetics, queer and feminist theory, and the environmental humanities. In my classes, we look at contemporary art, media, and literature to see how people are developing frameworks for making sense of urgent political, social, and environmental questions. We explore how poetry might develop new forms of intimacy and kinship, how horror films intervene into structures of racial and sexual violence, and how politics becomes fiction and fiction becomes politics.

My first book, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP, 2021), theorizes how stylistic developments in contemporary fiction, sculpture, film, and design respond to a sense of pervasive crisis. My second book, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, looks at Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica to explore the U.S. culture war, sexuality in the wake of HIV/AIDS, and questions of cultural appropriation. I also regularly contribute essays on contemporary art, racial capitalism, and sexual violence to popular magazines such as Artforum. 

At Beloit, I coordinated the Worldbuilding Career Channel, which develops programming and mentorship initiatives for students who want to find careers in making worlds through artistic production, game design, media production, and/or activism. The interdisciplinary space helped students find and reflect upon opportunities related to how the kinds of critical theory and histories of art and activism we learn in the classroom find traction in the world. 

You can learn more about my writing and teaching at my personal website: https://www.michaeldango.com/.