Rate My Professor Michael Litwack

Michael Litwack is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as Director of Undergraduate Programs and teaches in the Media and Technology Studies program. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, an M.A. from Brown University, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. Litwack’s research focuses on the theoretical and discursive encounters among race, media, technology, and modernity. His writing has appeared in journals such as Media Culture & Society, Cultural Critique, Media Fields, Jump Cut, and Camera Obscura, as well as in edited collections on masculinity and contemporary television and on Zionist settler colonialism. He has coedited a special dossier in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media on new directions in Marxist film and media studies (2023) and an issue of the contemporary arts journal PUBLIC titled “Smoke: Figures, Genres, Forms” (2019).

Litwack’s current projects include the SSHRC-funded collaborative research initiative “Mediations of Racial Capitalism,” which explores the entanglements between formations of raciality, class composition, and the history of media and media studies. He is also completing a book manuscript titled Racial Technics that examines the function of media technologies in imagining and managing Black freedom struggles in U.S. modernity, beginning with a re-evaluation of the trace of racial slavery in dominant conceptions of media as prosthetic “extensions of Man” and tracking philosophical, aesthetic, and political responses to the racialization of the human-technology relationship against the backdrop of twentieth-century media-technological developments including automation, cybernetics, and television. His supervisory areas include media theory, Black studies, critical race and ethnic studies, genealogies of communication and mediation, history of critical theory, U.S. literary and cultural studies, and post/humanisms. In 2026 he received the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award. Recent and upcoming courses he has taught or will teach include ENGL 217 Introduction to Literary and Critical Theory, MST 200 Media Theory, and various graduate seminars on media theory, forms of refusal, and race, modernity, and the human.