NCID-1094
Julie Ellison
Professor of American Culture, Professor of English Language and Literature, Director Academic Programs, Graduate Studies, Department of American Culture, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Professor of Art, Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 English Language and Literature (Yale University)
About
Julie Ellison is one of the foremost commentators in the United States on emerging models of socially responsive knowledge creation in the humanities and arts. Professor of American culture and English at the University of Michigan, Ellison is also a faculty associate in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and in the Stamps School of Art and Design. She served as associate vice president for research at U-M from 1996-2000 and as founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life from 2001 to 2007. She is currently the lead organizer of Citizen Alum, a multi-institutional project. Citizen Alum aims to construct a new paradigm of alumni as allies in education and agents of the public good. Ellison received her BA from Harvard in American history and literature and her PhD in English from Yale. She has authored three books on US and British literary history inquiries into the relationships among emotion, gender, power, and genre.
Current Work
Dr. Ellison is currently working on two books: Citizen Alum: A New Compact between Colleges and Alumni and Words to the Second Power: The Public Project of the Literary Humanities. Words to the Second Power: New practices of citizenship have emerged that are fundamentally related to the expressive arts. The experience of democratic citizenship is increasingly likely to be mediated by cultural activities (personal narrative, poetry, photography). These emerging forms of citizenship are rooted in older histories of poetry, civic culture, and the politics of hope as framed by African American thinkers, among others. Recent forms of citizenship present important changes: in expressive and critical genres; in the organization of public cultural work by artists and humanists; and in the discourses of hope and agency. Dr. Ellison analyzes the forms, feelings, and consequences of civically engaged cultural projects by introducing the term "lyric citizenship."
Research Area Keyword(s)
civic engagement, Equity and inclusion, higher education, poetry, public humanities