Seth Moglen is a literary critic, historian, playwright and public humanist. He is Professor of English, Africana Studies and American Studies at Lehigh University.
A scholar of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, he has particular expertise in modernism and African American writing. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between literary and political movements in the United States.
Moglen is the author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford University Press). He has published an edition of T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, a neglected masterpiece of the African American freedom struggle (Simon & Schuster). He is co-editor of Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On (Verso). He has published scholarly articles on a wide range of literary, historical and political topics.
Moglen’s first play, Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia, was produced in October 2019, as part of Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound, and then broadcast on PBS.
He is currently at work on a book, “Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy,” which employs modernist literary techniques to explore the 280-year history of one iconic American city.
Moglen is the co-founder of the South Side Initiative, a project of democratic university-community collaboration in the city of Bethlehem. He is actively engaged in a number of SSI’s projects, including the public humanities collaborations Finding H.D., Women of Bethlehem Steel, and Black Bethlehem.
Moglen has held research fellowships, most recently, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has received numerous awards for teaching and service at Lehigh, including the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching (in 2012 and 2018) and the Martin Luther King, Jr. award for advancing diversity and equity.
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 from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999.