Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University. He is a literary and cultural critic, and an author of critical and scholarly books as well as a writer of reviews, review articles, and columns.

He was director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995 to 2001, and chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004. He contributes to literary publications such as The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where he is also an editorial board member and writes a column, "At the Movies." Wood also teaches at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont during the summers.

Prior to teaching at Princeton, he taught at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, then took the chair of English at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.

In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the trans-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez and W. B. Yeats. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.