Timothy Brennan
216 Pillsbury Dr SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Timothy Brennan is a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and has held the Samuel Russell Chair (2014-2020) and the Donald V. Hawkins Chair (2023-4). He is a humanist, journalist and cultural theorist who works on literature, popular music, film, philosophy, the role of intellectuals in public life, the persistent fact of imperialism, and the anticolonial movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
A member of two departments (Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, and English), and the graduate faculty of American Studies, he is the author of eight books, four editions, and over 130 essays. His work has been widely reviewed in both mainstream and scholarly publications (The New York Times, Harper’s, the New Yorker, The Wall Street and Critical Inquiry and New Left Review). His work has been translated into eighteen languages (Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, German, Vietnamese, French, Serbian, Slovenian, and Hungarian). Since 2000, Prof. Brennan has been the featured speaker at over one hundred universities and cultural institutions throughout the world,
Brennan has been a featured guest on programs for the BBC, PBS, NPR, Chicago Public Radio, Berlin public radio, KPFK-Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio, The Nation, Al-Jazeera, Air France, and Al Bawaba News, among other media outlets. His essays have appeared in scholarly journals (among them, Critical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, Public Culture, The Oxford Handbook to Postcolonial Studies) but also in more popular venues such as The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Toronto Star, The London Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has worked as a journalist on WBAI radio in New York, and for three years ran his own news features program (“Out of Bounds”) for WKCR-FM, New York.
His books include Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (Macmillan, 1989), Music in Cuba (U of Minnesota P, 2001), Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008), At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard UP, 1997), Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia UP, 2006), Empire in Different Colors (Revolver, 2007), and Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford UP, 2014). His Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021) was a New York Times “Editors’ Choice,” a “best book” of 2021 in The Times, the Financial Times, and the Irish Independent, and the recipient of two honors for historical biography: the Palestine Prize (from the London-based “Middle East Monitor”) and the Elizabeth Longford Prize, chaired by Roy Foster and Antonia Fraser (shortlisted).
Professor Brennan is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German NEH), the Camargo Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. He has taught as a Visiting Senior Fellow at Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Potsdam, Rutgers University, the Humboldt University (Berlin), and invited Resident Fellow at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute,
He was director of the UMN Humanities Institute between 2002 and 2004, has chaired the Sociological Approaches to Literature Division of the Modern Language Association (MLA), served as interim Chair of CSCL and edited a book series “Cultural Margins” at Cambridge University Press.
Educational Background
- PhD: English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1987
- MA: English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1981
- BA: English and History, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1976
Specialties
- Philosophy
- Intellectuals and the media
- Studies of Imperialism and Imperial Culture
- Music of the African diaspora
- World Comparative Literature