Biography

Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State. He is the author of seven books to date, including Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon 1996; paper Vintage 1998); and What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton 2006). Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.

He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell 2004) and, with Cary Nelson, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge 1995). Bérubé was the co-founder of the Disability Studies Program at Penn State, which was originally housed in—and supported by—the Rock Ethics Institute.

Beginning in 2002–03, the Disability Studies Program hosted a series of speakers, films, and events devoted to the question of how to theorize disability both as a matter of minds/bodies and as a matter of built environments and social arrangements. The Disability Studies minor was created from that initiative, though it is now housed in the English Department