Michael Denning, newly named as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies, focuses his work on subjects ranging from the culture of the American working class to social movements and the history of cultural studies.

Denning is serving his second term as chair of the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration. His early work on popular literature and culture was published in "Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Thriller" and "Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America." His most recent book, "The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century," is a history of the culture and social movements that reshaped American modernism and mass culture in the 20th century. He is currently working on a study titled "Culture in the Age of Three Worlds."

Denning's numerous essays have explored such subjects as Marxism, the political and intellectual origins of cultural studies in the United States, proletarian literatures, and labor and culture in the Cold War. He has lectured widely at universities throughout the United States and in Brazil. Last year, he was one of 15 noted Yale faculty members invited to present one of the University's Tercentennial DeVane Lectures in the series "Democratic Vistas." Denning spoke on the subject "Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement," which explored democracy's relation to capitalism and the American state and addressed the contention by a number of human rights' and workers' groups that democracy is lacking in the workplace.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Denning earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He taught at Columbia and Wesleyan universities before joining the Yale faculty as an assistant professor in 1987. At Columbia, he served as associate director and, later, acting director of the Center for American Culture Studies.

Denning was named a full professor at Yale in 1990. He has served three separate terms as director of undergraduate studies in American studies. From 1993 to 1997 he was chair of the University's Steering Committee on Ethnic Studies.

Denning's honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Mellon Fellowship. He was selected a Reynolds Scholar at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, where he did graduate work.

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ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS

• Brisman is appointed the Karl Young Professor
  
  
• Denning is named William R. Kenan Jr. Professor
  
  
• Peterson earns the Niel Gray Jr. Professorship
  

  
  

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IN FOCUS: School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Forest 'physician' contends fire is critical to health of woodlands

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Press director to bid farewell to venture he helped build

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Exhibit features noted American artist's woodcuts

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Sociologist Roger Gould, a specialist on conflict and violence, dies

Homebuyer Program is extended with a special incentive

Yale Library launching changes to Orbis

Yale Center for British Art temporarily closing library collections this summer

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