Ph.D., Bowling Green State University
M.A., Eastern Michigan State University
B.A., University of Kansas

Michael Wentworth joined the faculty of UNCW in 1983 when he was hired in the Department of English.  Over the past twenty-five years Michael has taught fifty-five different courses in the English Department and eight different courses in the Graduate Liberal Studies program.  Michael’s teaching and research interests include the English Renaissance, literature of the American Midwest, American crime fiction, travel literature of the U.S., the Great Depression in American culture, the Beat movement in American culture, American culture in the 50s, American culture in the 60s, and popular culture studies. 

Michael has received a number of teaching awards at UNCW: the UNCW English Department Teaching Excellence Award (1991), The College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Award (1991), the UNCW Chapter of Phi Eta Sigma Outstanding Educator Award (1993), the UNCW Board of Trustees Teaching Excellence Award (1995), a UNCW Distinguished Teaching Professorship Award (1996), and the University of North Carolina Board of Governors Teaching Excellence Award (1998).

In addition to English composition and survey courses in American and British literature, Michael frequently teaches such interdisciplinary courses as “Main Street USA,” “Hobo and Vagabond Traditions in American Culture,” “Academic Mayhem: The College Experience in Literature, Folklore, and the Popular Media,” and “The Contemporary American Workplace.”

• “’When first I ended, then I first began’: Petrarch’s Triumph in Michael Drayton’s Idea” Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. U of Delaware P.

• “Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and the Genetics of Genre Formation.” Connotations: A Journal of Critical Debate.

• “A Matter of Taste: Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’ and Poe’s Aesthetic of Beauty.” American Transcendental Quarterly.

•  “A Walk through the Paradise Garden: Vachel Lindsay’s Idea of Kansas in Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.” MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.

• “At Home in the 50s: Cultural Nostalgia and William Inge’s Picnic.” Midwestern Drama.