Professor Emeritus
About
JULIE ELLISON is Professor Emeritx of American Culture and English at the University of Michigan.Her BA is in American History and Lit (Harvard). Her PhD is in English (Yale). Her threebooks on transatlantic literary cultures include Cato's Tears (Chicago, 1999), and articles appear in major journals, including American Literature, Studies in Romanticism, AmericanLiterary History, and Critical Inquiry. Ellison became Associate Vice President for Research atU-M in 1996 as an advocate for interdisciplinary public scholarship. From 2001 to 2007, she was founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). In that role, she proposed a zone for publicly active graduate education designed and managedentirely by graduate students. IA’s PAGE program, now in its fifteenth year, is known for itscollaborative leadership and intercohort mentoring. With Timothy K. Eatman, Ellison co-authored the oft-cited Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (2008), the signature project of IA’s commitment to equitable faculty rewards. Ellison was lead organizer of Citizen Alum, another multi-campus initiative, in 2012. Supported by the Kettering Foundation, she built a network of campus teams whose listening projects, teaching modules, and research culminated in 2018 in "Democracy's Graduates:Re-imagining Alumnihood," a special issue of AACU's Diversity & Democracy. Building on earlier essays for PMLA, Change, and the Humanities Indicators project, Ellison is working on several provocations. The first urges a more radical vision of graduate education, starting with a close rereading of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. With Scott Peters of Cornell, she is mulling over a project on the practice genealogies of these (necessarily plural) public humanities. Her interest in how to read a project and a project archive is ongoing. Ellison has collaborated with academics and artists in South Africa since 2003 and lectured in New Zealand as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2007.
