Michael J Drexler

Michael Drexler is Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of English at Bucknell University. He teaches American Literature from Colonization through the Long Nineteenth Century. Many of his courses explore resistance to the Atlantic slave-trade, slavery in the US, and the centrality of race in American literature. He approaches literary analysis from a Marxist and Psychoanalytic perspective.

He is currently working on North American fugitive slave narratives and their legacy in American fiction. In October 2019, Michael presented lecture at the University of Potsdam entitled “Looking Forward/Looking Backward: African American Worldmaking at an HBCU in West Virginia,” which developed out of his interest in Harpers Ferry how the figure of John Brown continues to inspire and haunt US culture. He is also writing a novel about an architect who built a mansion on the site of Brown’s execution.

Michael is co-author of The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr (with Ed White). He is also co-editor of two essay collections: The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories Geographies Textualities (with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon) and Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African American Literature (with Ed White), which was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2009. His critical edition of Leonora Sansay’s novels, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura, is available from Broadview Press.