Professor of American Culture and English. Faculty Associate, Department of African and Afroamerican Studies; Faculty Associate, Stamps School of Art and Design
About
JULIE ELLISON is Professor 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 articlesappear 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, shewas founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). In thatrole, 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 Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the EngagedUniversity (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 listeningprojects, teaching modules, and research culminated in 2018 in "Democracy's Graduates:Re-imagining Alumnihood," a special issue of Diversity & Democracy. Building on earlieressays for PMLA, Change, and the Humanities Indicators project, Ellison is working onseveral provocations. The first urges a more radical vision of graduate education, startingwith a close rereading of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class forWomen in Academia. With Scott Peters of Cornell, she is beginning a project on the practicegenealogies of these (necessarily plural) public humanities. Finally, as part I of a series ofessays on the future of purposeful work, ‘how to read a project.’ She also is on the advisorygroup for IA's Mellon-funded "Leading and Learning Initiative: Shifting Institutional Culture toFortify Public Scholarship." Ellison has collaborated with academics and artists in SouthAfrica since 2003 and lectured in New Zealand as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2007.
