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Professor John Mowitt

Professor John Mowitt

  • Position: Professor Emeritus
  • Areas of expertise: Western philosophy; the history of critical theory (French, German and Italian); comparative literature; critical media studies (emphasis on cinema and sound); Postcolonial studies
  • Email: J.W.Mowitt@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 5269
  • Website: ORCID

Profile

I received my doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1982 and taught in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cites from 1985 until 2013. I have published numerous books and articles on the broad areas of theory, culture and politics, and serve as a senior coeditor of the academic journal, Cultural Critique. Member of the Research and Innovation Committee in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

Responsibilities

  • Leadership Chair in Critical Humanities

Research interests

My interests follow mainly from my areas of expertise.  However, for the last 15 years I have been working mainly in the anti-disciplinary area of sound studies. My current project, provisionally titled Tunings, is a study of the encounter between literature and music, specifically as realized in the music essay (compositions titled, ‘essays’, not essays written about music).

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD in Comparative Literature
  • BA in Philosophy
  • AA in Liberal Studies

Professional memberships

  • American Comparative Literature Association

Student education

As a partisan of the ‘critical humanities’, I have a keen interest in curricular innovation. To that end I have both developed new modules (‘Making Sense of Sound;) and helped re-design the cultural and media studies course (‘Keywords’ and ‘Introduction to Cultural Analysis’).

Research groups and institutes

  • Centre for Critical Materialist Studies
  • Futures of the University