Michael Lipkin is the Academic Director and Senior Instructional Professor of the Program for Public Thinking. His teaching and his scholarlship explores the relationship between literary techniques, cultural formations, and public thought, especially at times of crisis. He writes actively about culture and politics for American and European publications, such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Left Review, the Merkur, and many others. His scholarly writing has appeared in the Colloquia Germanic and the German Studies Review. His translation of Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth (Tadellöser & Wolff) was published with New York Review of Books Classics in 2023. At Parrhesia, Michael is responsible for the academic curriculum of the Program for Public Thinking, developing courses where students learn about the history and the practice of public thinking, from the agora to social media, where they have the chance to bring debates from their lives and their studies to a wider world.
Before starting at the University of Chicago, Michael was a professor of German at Hamilton College, where he helped design and expand the German program. He holds a Ph.D in Germanic Languages from Columbia University.