2021 Benedum Distinguished Scholars Showcase

This year’s virtual celebration is modeled on the Emmy-award winning series “Inside the Actors Studio” by James Lipton and will feature 3MT-style video presentations of each of the 2019-2020 scholars followed by a live panel discussion and moderated Q&A session.

Michael Germana is honored in the humanities and the arts category of the Benedum Distinguished Scholars. An English professor with specializations in American literature and American studies, his research includes two books and over a half-dozen articles as well as presentations and invited talks. This award recognizes in particular Gemana’s 2018 volume “Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist,” a unifying theory that weaves its way through the sum of Ellison’s work. The work was published by one of the most prestigious presses in the field, Oxford University Press. The interdisciplinary nature of Ellison’s corpus is reflected in Germana’s approach that draws upon film theory, antebellum visual rhetoric, photomaterialism and music theory. The result is a complete re-evaluation of Ellison’s lifework and a much-needed lens for re-examining the legal, economic and social frameworks through which the body is read in our own time. The work has been praised by reviewers as “the finest and most important work on Ellison to date” and for transforming the field of Ellison studies.