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Seth Moglen, Professor of English at Lehigh University

Seth Moglen

Professor

610.758.3326
sema@lehigh.edu
0035 - Drown Hall
Education:

PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1999

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Additional Interests

  • Modernism
  • African American Literature
  • 19th- and 20th-century American Literature
  • Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Cultural Materialism

Research Statement

Seth Moglen is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, with particular expertise in modernism and African American writing.

Moglen’s research focuses on the relationship between literary and political movements in the United States.  He is especially interested in the role that literature has played in the development of movements for economic justice and for racial and gender equality.  He has published on modernism and African American literature, on the history of the American Left and the African American freedom struggle, on psychoanalytic and cultural theory and on the democratic promise of the 21st-century university.

Moglen is currently at work on an experimental book that employs modernist literary strategies in order to explore the history of one iconic city, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from its 18th-century founding to its post-industrial present. The book explores the egalitarian aspirations of the people of Bethlehem over the course of three centuries, as well as the evolving structures of economic exploitation and racial and gender hierarchy that have constrained those aspirations. Written both for scholars of American Studies and for a broad general audience, the book seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions of what equality has meant, and might yet mean, in the United States.

Moglen is actively engaged in a range of public humanities collaborations, many of which have emerged in tandem with his current book project.  To learn more about his public humanities practice – including his first play, Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia – click here.

Biography

Seth Moglen is a literary critic, historian, playwright and public humanist. He is Professor of English, Africana Studies and American Studies at Lehigh University.

A scholar of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, he has particular expertise in modernism and African American writing. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between literary and political movements in the United States.

Moglen is the author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford University Press). He has published an edition of T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, a neglected masterpiece of the African American freedom struggle (Simon & Schuster). He is co-editor of Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On (Verso). He has published scholarly articles on a wide range of literary, historical and political topics.

Moglen’s first play, Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia, was produced in October 2019, as part of Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound, and then broadcast on PBS.

He is currently at work on a book, “Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy,” which employs modernist literary techniques to explore the 280-year history of one iconic American city.

Moglen is the co-founder of the South Side Initiative, a project of democratic university-community collaboration in the city of Bethlehem. He is actively engaged in a number of SSI’s projects, including the public humanities collaborations Finding H.D.Women of Bethlehem Steel, and Black Bethlehem.

Moglen has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has received numerous awards for teaching and service at Lehigh, including the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching (in 2012 and 2018) and the Martin Luther King, Jr. award for advancing diversity and equity.

Having studied history as an undergraduate at Yale University and as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford University, Moglen received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999.

Selected Publications

Books

Seth Moglen, Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2007;   Russian translation, ASP, 2024).

Seth Moglen, ed., Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South by T. Thomas Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2008; 2nd edition, 2022) 

Seth Moglen et.al. eds., Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On (Verso, 1989)
 

Articles

“The Choir House and the Blast Furnace: H.D.’s Bethlehem,”  Raritan  Vol. 38 no. 4 (Spring 2019). 

“Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past,” in History of the Present  Vol. 6 no. 2 (Fall 2016).

“Sharing Knowledge, Practicing Democracy: A Vision for the 21st-Century University,” in Education, Justice and Democracy, eds. Danielle Allen and Rob Reich (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

“Excess and Utopia: Meditations on Moravian Bethlehem,” in History of the Present Vol. 2. no. 2   (Fall 2012).

“On Mourning Social Injuries” in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol.10, no.2 (Summer 2005).

"Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso" in Callaloo, Vol. 25, no. 4 (December 2002).


For more information and to download articles, go to Seth Moglen's website

Teaching

ENG/ AAS 320: Imagining Freedom: 19th-Century African American Literature & Politics
ENG/AAS 325:   The Harlem Renaissance
ENG 381:  How Free Can We Be In the Modern World? Realism & Naturalism in American Lit.
ENG 379:   Modern American Writing & the Problem of War
ENG 477:   Modernism & Mourning 
ENG 482:   Theories of Literature & Social Justice 
ENG 496:   Public Humanities: Literature, Democracy & the Cultivation of the Public Sphere
 

For more information about Seth Moglen’s teaching (including course descriptions) – and direction of Ph.D., M.A. and undergraduate research – go to Seth Moglen's website