rdi.emory.edu - Race and Difference Initiative

mmoon42674@yahoo.com
Professor and Director of American Studies / Co-Director of Graduate Studies, ILA

Michael Moon's scholarship focuses on the ways in which a wide range of writing and visual texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has enriched and complicated our understanding of embodied experience, including erotic experience ("real," fantasied, and virtual). Moon's first book, Disseminating Whitman, (Harvard University Press, 1991) explores the poet's radical revisions of his culture's notions of the nature and limits of the body and of sexuality. His second book, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Duke University Press, 1998), focuses on the use of childhood sexuality as a resource for the art of Henry James, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol. He is currently completing a study of the work of "outsider artist" Henry Darger. He has published widely on topics ranging from the male homoerotics of the classic American Horatio Alger story and domestic architecture vis-a-vis queer theory to (in collaboration with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) the films of John Waters and the relation between the writing of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman and that of her poet son Walt. Moon has taught gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, visual studies, and media studies at Duke, Johns Hopkins, and, at Emory, courses on embodiment, theory, and media, and a planned offering on sexualities east and west.