Michael Tavel Clarke

Dr. Michael Tavel Clarke studies and teaches American literature and culture since the Civil War, with a special interest in cultural studies and New Historicism, theories of the body, and gender studies. He has written a book on the American obsession with bigness and its implications for ideas about the body and has published articles on Jewish-American autobiography, African-American literature, and U.S. film. He is currently at work on a cultural history of the iconic figure of the "little guy" that explores changing conceptions of class and masculinity in U.S. culture. He offers graduate courses in American realism and American modernism, and he won a teaching award at the University of Iowa and was nominated for an award at the University of Calgary.