Please join us at PAMLA 2026 for a special Plenary Address with Michael Bérubé (Penn State) on November 14 , a leading voice in literary studies, cultural politics, and the defense of the humanities.
A renowned scholar and public intellectual, Bérubé’s work spans literary theory, higher education, disability studies, and academic freedom. In 2024, Columbia University Press published his most recent book, The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species, focusing on explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate the fate of Homo sapiens. In a lively, conversational style, he considers novels by writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Liu Cixin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, as well as films that feature hostile artificial intelligence, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and the Terminator and Matrix franchises. Bérubé argues that these works portray a future in which we have become able to see ourselves from the vantage point of something other than the human. Though framed by the possibility of human extinction, they are driven by a vision of the “ex-human”—a desire to imagine that another species is possible. For all science fiction readers worried about the fate of humanity, The Ex-Human is an entertaining yet sobering account of how key novels and films envision the world without us.
He is the author of twelve books to date, including Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper, Vintage, 1998); and What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006). He has also published two edited collections, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995; with Cary Nelson) and The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2005). In 2015 he published The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, co-authored with Jennifer Ruth (Palgrave). His ninth book, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read, was published by NYU Press in early 2016; in October 2016, Beacon Press published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up, which was written with extensive input from Jamie himself. In 2021, the Norton Library (a new series from W. W. Norton) published his edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the 1818 text). In 2022, Johns Hopkins University Press published his second collaboration with Jennifer Ruth, It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, a provocative book that asks whether academic freedom should extend to white supremacists, or whether we should treat advocates of racist pseudoscience the way we treat believers in phlogiston or the efficacy of human sacrifice.
Bérubé has also held numerous leadership roles within the profession, including serving as president of the Modern Language Association and on the executive bodies of the American Association of University Professors, where he contributed significantly to national conversations on academic freedom and tenure. This plenary speaks to the heart of PAMLA 2026’s theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict.” Bérubé’s scholarship offers a vital framework for thinking through how power circulates within and beyond the academy, and how cultural narratives both sustain and challenge structures of authority.
Further details regarding the plenary session, including date, time, and location, will be announced soon.
We hope you will be able to join us for this timely and thought-provoking conversation at PAMLA 2026.