Professional Description
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.