Michael Bibler

Michael Bibler

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Tulane University

225-578-5922
mbibler@lsu.edu
249-B Allen Hall

Biography

Michael P. Bibler joined LSU in 2013, and his research focuses on queer readings of 19th and 20th century American literature and culture, with a special focus on the U.S. South and its wider, transnational connections. He is author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (2009), and co-editor of Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (2007) and the first scholarly reprint of Arna Bontemp's 1936 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Drums at Dusk (2009). He has also published in many journals and edited collections, including PMLA, Angelaki, south: a scholarly journal, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Philological Quarterly, The Tacky South, The New View from Cane River: Critical Essays on Kate Chopin’s At Fault, Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South, Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, and Keywords for Southern Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript about queer literature, music, art, theater, and film from the 1980s to the present, entitled Literally: The Queerness of Things Just as They Are. Intervening in longstanding debates in Queer Studies about antinormativity, this monograph examines texts and performances that make uncommon fun out of the rules and categories of mainstream culture not by radically opposing them, as we conventionally think about queerness, but by actually inhabiting them as literally as possible. Specifically, the book focuses on John Waters's film A Dirty Shame, the music and lyrics of the B-52s, a late story by Truman Capote, the early videos of RuPaul as Starrbooty, four plays and films about small-town Texas, and the "soundsuits" of artist Nick Cave.

Area(s) of Interest

19th and 20th century American literature, Southern Studies, Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Curriculum Vitae