Seth Moglen joined the Lehigh English Department faculty in 1999, and he teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.  He offers seminars on literary modernism, African-American literature and culture, and U.S. literary realism and naturalism. His courses are often interdisciplinary in method and they frequently explore the relationship between literature and politics. (His recent seminars include:  "Imagining Freedom:  19th-Century African-American Literature and Politics"; "Modern American Writing and the Problem of War": "Modernism and Mourning"; "The Harlem Renaissance.")  Moglen has strong theoretical interests in the traditions of psychoanalysis and cultural materialism. He is an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies and American Studies Programs at Lehigh.

Moglen's research, like his teaching, is centrally concerned with the relationship between expressive culture and the politics of liberation. He has published scholarly articles on 20th-century American literature, on Left politics in the U.S. and Britain, and on psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2007). He has also recently published a new edition of T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White:  Land, Labor and Politics in the South (1884) - a neglected masterpiece of the African-American radical political tradition (Simon and Schuster, 2007).  He is co-editor of Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On (Verso, 1989).  He is now working on a book entitled Black Enlightenment:  A Study in African-American Literature and Politics, 1845-1945. 

Moglen is Co-Director of the South Side Initiative.

Having studied history as an undergraduate at Yale University and as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford University, Moglen received his Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999.