Michael K. Hill

Biography

Mike Hill writes on contemporary race relations and "racial formation theory" in the U.S. This includes multiracialism, U.S. demographic change, racial passing. He also works on the history of writing, in particular, how the origin of novel relates to democratic social movements in the formative period of the British Enlightenment. Hill's most recent book, coauthored with Warren Montag, is The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2015), examines not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His other books include: Whiteness: A Critical Reader (NYU, 1997); Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (Verso, 2001); and After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (NYU, 2004). An additional book, Ecologies of War: Racial Complexity in an Age of Failed States, will be published on the University of Minnesota Press. Hill is currently on the editorial board of the Review of Education/Pedagogy/and Cultural Studies; Cultural Logic; and The Global South. He is also Associate Editor of the Minnesota Review.

Research Interest

Race studies; "whiteness"; U.S. minority relations; civil society; multiracialism; U.S. demographic change; racial passing; history of democracy; relation between "print culture" (the novel) and politics; 18th-century political economy and culture