Modernism Meets Literary Brilliance

Dr. Michelle E. Moore illuminates the complexities of American Modernism through rigorous scholarly analysis and transformative literary criticism that reshapes how we understand twentieth century literature.

Michelle E. Moore

Educator

Literature & Film Professor at College of DuPage
academic research

Scholar

Inspiring Next Generation Film and Literary Thinkers

Meet Dr. Moore

Modernism Expert

Distinguished Professor of Film and Literature whose groundbreaking scholarship on American Modernism has reshaped literary discourse across academia and beyond.

professor scholar

Literary Analysis Pioneer

Masterfully decodes the complexities of Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, revealing how Chicago shaped the American Modernist movement through rigorous textual examination.
academic engagement

Film Studies Innovator

Bridges film studies and literature studies to illuminate overlooked narratives in canonical and outsider works, engaging audiences with cutting-edge scholarly insights daily.

Scholarly Works

Groundbreaking publications spanning American literature, cinema, and cultural criticism
literary scholarship
Selected Publications and Articles
  • "The Case For Dreadful Hollow: Reading Faulkner's Vampire Screenplay." Literature/Film Quarterly: forthcoming
  • "Thea in Wonderland: Willa Cather's Revision of the Alice Novels and the Gender Codes of the Western Frontier." Cather Studies 11. Eds. Ann Moseley, John Murphy, and Robert Thacker. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P: forthcoming
  • "Chicago's Cliff Dwellers and The Song of the Lark" Cather Studies 9. Eds. Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P: 2011. 93-113.
  • "'The Unsleeping Cabal': Faulkner's Fevered Vampires and the Other South" The Faulkner Journal 24.2 (Spring 2009): 55-76.
  • "'If This Was a Rape, Then Why Would She Be a Whore?': Rape in Todd Solondz's Films" Rape in Art Cinema, Ed. Dominique Russell. New York: Continuum Press, 2010. 129-144.
  • "Killers and Diers: White Noise, Violence, Genre" Academic Exchange Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2007): 66-71.
  • "'The Most Extraordinary Effect': Teaching Ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw," Approaches to Teaching James' The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, and Other Short Fiction, Eds. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler, New York: MLA, 2005. 127-131.
  • "Bharati Mukherjee," Great World Writers: Twentieth Century, Ed. Patrick M. O'Neill Tarrytown, New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2004. 937-952.
  • "Cracking the Case: Erupting Bodies in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho," Proceedings of the Federation Rhetoric Symposium: Emerging Rhetorics, April 30- May 7, 1999, Ed. William E. Tanner. Mesquite, Texas: Caxton's Modern Arts Press, 1999. CD-ROM
academic presentations
Recent Lectures and Presentations
  • "My Swift and My Armour: Hemingway's Critique of the Art and Literature Scene" 17th Biennial International Hemingway Conference, Oak Park IL, July 2016.
  • "Creating Scholars: Online Learning Design that Fosters Student Success and Retention" Enriching Learning Environments with Technology Conference, Elgin IL, March 2016.
  • "Alice in the American West: Modernism and the Northern Pacific Railroad's Wonderland Route." Modernist Studies Association Conference 17, Boston, MA, November 2015.And this older one too. It's been left out for awhile. Could it go in the appropriate time place, by the DH Lawrence entry from the same conference? Thanks.
  • "Hemingway, Faulkner, and Chicago" Modern Language Association Convention, Boston MA, January 2013. Peer reviewed panels jointly given by the Faulkner Society and the Hemingway Society.
  • "'A Patch of Dried Blood': Vampires, Veterans, and The Sun Also Rises" 16th Biennial International Conference of the Hemingway Society, Venice, Italy, June 2014.
  • Invited to speak on "The Fictional Earnest Hemingway" at the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park 2014 Spring Program, April 2014.
  • "Hemingway, Edgar Lee Masters, and Chicago" Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago IL, January 2014. Peer reviewed Panel given by the Hemingway Society.
  • "Death Comes for the Archbishop and the Western Film" 14th International Willa Cather Seminar, Northern Arizona University, June 2013.
  • "Modernist Patron/Artist, Celebrity/Audience: Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, and 'The Vampire of Taos'" Modern Language Association Convention, Boston MA, January 2013. Peer reviewed panel given by the D. H. Lawrence Society.
  • "'I Only Want Impossible Things': Thea and Alice in Wonderland" 13th International Cather Seminar, Smith College, MA, June 2011.
  • "Horror and Outrage: Gothic Masculinities in Absalom, Absalom! and The Song of the Lark" American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, May 2011.
  • "'The Ultimate Degradation': Spiritualism in the Aftermath of the Civil War, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved" read in absentia at the Faulkner and Morrison Conference held in Cape Giradeau, MO October 2010.
  • "'Consider Me Dead': The Female Vampire in Cather's The Song of the Lark," American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 2010.
  • "Immigration and the Scandinavian Vampire in Let the Right One In" Global Flicks Film Festival, Glen Ellyn, IL, February 2010.
  • "Like the Buildings in a City Block: Chicago's Cliff Dwellers and The Song of the Lark" 12th International Cather Seminar, Chicago, IL, July 2009.
  • "Hot for Teacher: Film Representations of the Student Sex Scandals" Teachers, Teaching, and the Movies Conference, Charleston, SC, October 2007.
  • "The Man Whom He Would Be if He Could Metamorphose Into: Vampires, Slavery, and Male Sexuality in Absalom, Absalom!" Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Oxford, MS, July 2007.
  • "Unlimited Quantities of M-M-M Food": The Modern Artist as Cannibal in the Postwar American Novel," Midwest Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, IL, November 2006.
  • "'I Drank Your Blood': Vampires, Violence, and Beloved," Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, Louisville, KY, March 2003.
published books
Books and Monographs

ReFocus: The Films of John Waters (ReFocus: The American Directors Series)

Pick up the newly released softcover of ReFocus: The Films of John Waters through Amazon or Edinburgh University Press:

đź”— Amazon

đź”— Edinburgh

The first collected volume of work on cult film director and icon John Waters, which offers a comprehensive study of his work as an important filmmaker and cultural force. Includes chapters covering important themes in Waters’s work, stylistic tendencies, his relationship to the art world, and interviews reflecting on the impact of Waters’s films on his collaborators and audience. Also features a new retrospective interview with Waters in which he reflects on his career and films.
ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader (ReFocus: The American Directors Series)
Amazon

ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader (ReFocus: The American Directors Series) Amazon

Offers the first comprehensive academic text to explore Paul Schrader’s film career through analysis of his directing, screenwriting, and film criticism

Contains a chapter-length interview, in which Schrader examines the arc of his career for the first time and revises previous statements about filmmaking and film criticismProvides a valuable update to previous texts on Schrader

Considers Schrader’s overlooked films and provides new insight into their connections with Schrader’s better known films

Contains chapters on Schrader’s work since 2008, the publication date of the last book on his filmmaking

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict (Historicizing Modernism)

Amazon

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism is the first full-length study of the vexed relationship between America's great modernist writers and the nation's “second city.” Michelle E. Moore explores the ways in which the defining writers of the era-Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald-engaged with the city and reacted against the commercial styles of "Chicago realism" to pursue their own, European-influenced mode of modernist art. Drawing on local archives to illuminate the literary culture of early 20th-century Chicago, this book reveals an important new dimension to the rise of American modernism.

Intellectual Provocations Reshaping Film and Literary Scholarship Today

Dr. Moore's groundbreaking research pierces through conventional literary analysis with audacious interrogations of power, representation, and meaning.
literary scholarship

Research Themes Driving Academic Excellence

  • Vampire Imagery in American Literature unravels how the undead stalk through the American literary imagination, embodying anxieties about sexuality, mortality, and cultural transgression in ways that challenge comfortable interpretations

  • Gender Codes in Frontier Fiction deconstructs the rigid masculine and feminine performativity embedded in frontier narratives, exposing how these texts both reinforce and subvert conventional gender hierarchies
  • Film and Rape Representation in Cinema examines the politics of cinematic depiction, interrogating how filmmakers negotiate trauma, agency, and ethical representation in ways that matter profoundly
  • Ambiguity in Classic Literature celebrates the productive uncertainty and interpretive richness found in canonical works, arguing that ambivalence itself becomes a site of genuine intellectual freedom and meaning-making

Education:

  • Ph.D. SUNY at Binghamton
  • M.A. SUNY at Binghamton
  • B.A. Dickinson College

Academic and Teaching Honors:

  • Outstanding College of DuPage Faculty for 2010-2011
  • College of DuPage Technology Award Grant 2007, 2008
  • Spirit of Service Award. College of DuPage 2007
  • Who's Who Among America's Teachers 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005
  • Mellon Fellowship Finalist, Grinnell College 2002
  • Graduate Teaching Assistant Award 1995-2001
  • Tuition Scholarship Award 1995-2001