Michael Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature & Culture, a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. He is also the Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies and Electus Faculty Fellow in the David C. Frederick Honors College. His work endeavors to render inoperable the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, theory, literary critique, and aesthetics. He has published two monographs, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave:2018) and Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020). He has begun work on two new book projects. The first, The Door of No Return: A Phenomenology of Blackness, endeavors to articulate a theory of the Black subject that reaches beyond the limitations of the notion of anti-Blackness as an irreducible and omnipresent feature of the world as we know it. The second, Sir Lewis, is a trade biography of the Afro-British Formula One driver, Lewis Hamilton. He is the co-editor of The Journal of French and Francophone Studies and a member of the editorial boards of Critical Times and Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon and the PMLA Advisory Committee. Michael is in the third year of an immersive media residency at ONX Studios in New York City and Athens, Greece supported by the Onassis Foundation.
- United States Naval Academy, Bachelor of Science (Political Science)
- University of Chicago, MA (Committee on International Relations)
- Brown University, MA (Comparative Literature)
- Brown University, PhD (Africana Studies)