Michaela Bronstein joined the JHU English Department in 2025. Her scholarship explores the history of the novel, with a special focus on modernist literature. Her current work examines how the form of the novel has been shaped by the challenges of depicting radical political action.

Her first book, Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction, came out from Oxford University Press in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. It examines the later uses of modernist literary forms in unexpected times and places.

Her various research interests are united by an investment in the transhistorical lives of literary texts — both the real-life histories of later readers encountering older texts, and the ways the idea of speaking to the future shapes literature’s understanding of its own place in history. She also examines the ways the intimate temporalities of reading — the time it takes to read a long novel, the eagerness we feel as a reader to find out what happens next — connect to the larger timescales of life in history. Other research interests include serialized television, as well as literature and climate change.

She received her PhD in 2012 from the English Department at Yale University, and joined the Harvard Society of Fellows before teaching briefly at MIT. She taught at Stanford University from 2016 through 2024.

“Just Add Global,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 25.5: 679-693. On the rise of the field descriptor “Global Anglophone” and its effects on postcolonial studies.

[https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2161055]

“Novel Theory Beyond Democracy,” invited contribution to cluster on democracy and the American novel, American Literary History 35.1 (January 2023): 143-157.

[https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac241]

“Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 54.3: 379-403. On modernist literature’s response to Russian revolutionary politics and literature.

[https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9353766]

“Taking the Future into Account: Today’s Novels for Tomorrow’s Readers.” PMLA 134.1 (January 2019): 121-136. On the problem of writing for the future in an era of climate change.

[https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.1.121]

“From Bolshevism to Bloomsbury: The Garnett Translations and Russian Politics in England.” In the Bloomsbury Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, eds. Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross, 2018. On the political aims of Constance Garnett’s Russian translations.

[doi.org/10.5040/9781350014947-014]

“The Princess Among the Polemicists: Aesthetics and Protest at Midcentury.” American Literary History 29.1 (Spring 2017): 26-49. On invocations of modernism in Black American midcentury aesthetic theory and fiction.

(Awarded the 1921 Prize for the Best Essay on American literature, 2017, from the American Literature Society)

[https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajw062]

“Four Generations, One Crime.” In Crime Fiction as World Literature, Bloomsbury, eds. David Damrosch, Theo D’Haen, and Louise Nilsson, 2017. On the transformation of one plot in the hands of Dostoevsky, Conrad, Ngũgĩ, and Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ.

[https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501319365.ch-005]

“How Not to Re-read Novels: The Critical Value of First Reading.” Journal of Modern Literature 39.3 (Spring 2016): 76-94. On a methodology for close-reading the experience of reading a novel for the first time.

[https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.39.3.06]

“Modernist Binge-Watching.” In The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Routledge, eds. Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges, 2015. On parallel transformations in the modernist novel and contemporary prestige television.

[https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315689272]

“A Case for Literary Transhistory: Ngūgī’s Use of Conrad.” Modern Language Quarterly 75.3 (Sept. 2014): 411-437. On interpreting Conrad through the perspective of an African novelist.

(Honorable Mention, Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Prize)

[https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2690091]

“Conrad’s Faulkner.” Essays in Criticism LXII.1 (Jan. 2012): 83-99. [https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgr030]