People

Departmental Areas of Study have been established to allow a visitor to quickly find members of our faculty who share a particular area of study. Click on any of the links below to find other faculty members who have noted their interest in the same areas or click on the link above to browse all faculty by area of study.

Essays and book chapters in progress focus on: civic professionalism in the humanities; best-selling poems in the age of the novel: popular verse tales of exile and trauma; narrating hope: surmise, critical memory, and race after 9/11; and literary history and sites of conscience.

In general, my work addresses theories and production of public culture; institutional change in higher education, particularly in the humanities; the public humanities; literary and cultural history focusing on gender and genre in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. and Britain; and emotion theory .

BIO

Julie Ellison is Professor of American Culture and English at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 1980. She is also a Faculty Associate in the Department of African and Afroamerican Studies and the Stamps School of Art and Design.
 
She has served as Graduate Chair in English, Undergraduate Chair in American Culture, and Associate Vice President for Research (1997-2000). As AVP, she proposed and led the Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA) in 1997‐1998. She has been a John Rich Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, a Senior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and received the Regents Distinguished Public Service Award in 2004. She is a member of the editorial board Liberal Education and has served on the Board of Advisors of the Library of America.
 
Ellison received her B.A. from Harvard in American History and Literature and her Ph.D. in English from Yale.  Chicago University Press published her third book, Cato's Tears, in 1999. Her earlier books were Emerson’s Romantic Style (Princeton, 1984) and Delicate Subjects (Cornell, 1990).  Her articles have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, Critical Inquiry, ELH, and edited volumes, most recently “Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state " in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (Columbia, 2012). Currently she is investigating emergent models of socially responsive knowledge creation in the humanities.  Her research has been supported by an NEH fellowship, the Kettering Foundation, and University of Michigan programs, including the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
 
From its launch at a White House conference in 1999 until 2007, Ellison served as Founding Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium of 90 colleges and universities. In that role, she co‐authored Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (2008). She published “This American Life: How are the Humanities Public?" one of five commissioned essays for the Humanities Indicators Prototype of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Her guest column, “The New Public Humanists,” will appear in the March 2013 issue of PMLA.
 
Since 2003, she has collaborated with academics and artists in South Africa. Ellison also lectured in New Zealand as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2007. Her teaching includes courses on "Getting In: What College Means in America," "PublicPoetry," and "Organizing Culture.”
 
Currently, Ellison is lead organizer of “Citizen Alum," a multi-institutional project based at U-M. For more information, visit www.citizenalum.org.

Books include Emerson’s Romantic Style (Princeton University Press, 1984); Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender and the Ethics of Understanding (Cornell University Press, 1990); Cato’s Tears (Chicago University Press, Fall 1999). Articles have appeared in American Literature, Studies in Romanticism, American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, ELH, and MLQ, and in a number of edited volumes. 

As Principal Investigator of Imagining America’s ongoing initiative on faculty rewards, Ellison co‐authored Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (2008). She published “This American Life: How are the Humanities Public?" as one of five commissioned essays for the Humanities Indicators Prototype of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recent publications include  "Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata's the 51st (dream) state," in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions eds. Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) pp. 91-113 and "Sensibility," in A Handbook to Romanticism Studies, eds. Julia Wright and Joel Faflak (London: Blackwell, 2012) pp 37-54. Ellison's current book project, "Lyric Citizenship," under contract with the University of Michigan Press, focuses on a new public humanities. Her guest column, "The New Public Humanists," will appear in the March 2013 issue of PMLA.