People
Michael J. Kramer
20th-Century U.S. Cultural and Intellectual History
Office: 1908 Sheridan Road
Phone: 847-491-8916
E-mail: mjk
northwestern.edu
Michael J. Kramer (Ph.D. University of North Carolina, 2006) is a lecturer in History and American Studies and an Undergraduate Academic Adviser in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He specializes in twentieth-century United States cultural and intellectual history with a focus on popular culture, the arts, civil society and citizenship, and transnational history. Professor Kramer received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 2006 and his B.A. from Columbia University in 1995. He has taught at Loyola University, Lake Forest College, and at George Mason University, where he was the J.N.G. Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Art History in 2006-2007.
In addition to academic advising and teaching, he is currently preparing a book manuscript, "Let's Get Together: Rock Music and the Making of the Sixties Counterculture" (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). Future research projects include a biography of the public intellectual Paul Goodman, a history of the 1976 United States bicentennial celebration, a reexamination of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, a history of the concept of vernacular culture, and a study of the development of arts criticism in the United States since the late nineteenth century.
As a teacher, he is interested in historical pedagogy, particularly how to teach effective historical writing skills and how to incorporate multimedia materials (film, music, art, performance) into the study of the past. In 2009-2010, he is overseeing the Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public intellectual Research Workshop (http://engagedhumanities.wordpress.com/), co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern.
In addition to his academic work, Professor Kramer has been a journalist, musician, and farmhand. He maintains a blog of cultural criticism at www.culturerover.com and participates in HASTAC (the Humanities Arts Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) at http://www.hastac.org/blogs/michael-j-kramer.
northwestern.edu