Michael Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature & Culture in the Department of English. He is also the department’s Director of Graduate Studies, an Electus Faculty Fellow in the David C. Frederick’s Honors College, and a Fellow in the European Studies Center’s Transdisciplinary Security Seminar. Michael is multi-disciplinary scholar whose work is focused on expanding the vocabulary of the Black Radical Tradition. He has published two monographs: An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave: 2018) and Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020). He has two more that are forthcoming: The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press) a work of speculative philosophy and theory that aspires to think beyond the limitations of the world of Anti-Blackness. The second is a trade biography of Seven-Time Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton entitled Sir Lewis (Grand Central Publishing/Legacy Lit). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Malcolm X in Context (Cambridge University Press) and the co-editor of Cambridge’s new Elements of Black Thought Series. He is the co-editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and on the editorial boards of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, Critical Times, and the PMLA Advisory Committee.
He is in the second year of an immersive reality residency at ONX Studios in New York City and Athens, Greece where he recently debuted a sonic assemblage on police violence composed with multi-Grammy Award Winning musician Nicholas Payton with the support of Pitt Momentum Funding.
Professor Sawyer joined the University of Pittsburgh from Colorado College (2015-2021) where he was appointed Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies and an affiliate in the Department of English. He was also recently appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and the Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy where he studied Aerospace Engineering and Political Science, an M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations, and a Masters in Comparative Literature and PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University.
Click here to view his current CV.