Michael Bibler

Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams Professor
Ph.D., Tulane University

225-578-5922
mbibler@lsu.edu
223-C Allen Hall

Curriculum Vitae

Biography

Michael P. Bibler is the Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His teaching and research focus on 19th and 20th century American literature and culture, southern studies, African American studies, and gender and sexuality studies. His recent book Literally: The Queerness of Things Just as They Are (Fordham UP, 2026) examines music, literature, film, video, and visual art by John Waters, the B-52s, Truman Capote, RuPaul, Del Shores, Nick Cave, and others. The book shows how these queer artists and performers refuse to take the norms and categories of mainstream culture seriously by actually inhabiting those norms as literally as possible, creating what Bibler calls “literal camp.” By foregrounding what is already visible on the surface, these works thus offer a fresh alternative to models of queerness defined solely by opposition to the normal and instead “crash the normal” as one crashes a party.

Bibler is also co-editor of the literary reprint series Radical Souths at UNC Press, republishing 20th-century works that directly challenge the conservatism of the South and the genteel tradition of southern letters by advocating for racial, gender, sexual, and economic equality and social justice. Recent books include a Communist novel about a North Carolina mill strike from 1932, a lesbian anti-KKK novel from 1984, and a Civil Rights novel about voting rights from 1963. 

Bibler’s first book, Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (U of Virginia P, 2009), shows how Black and white southern writers used figures of same-sex intimacy to imagine forms of social equality within and against the oppressive hierarchies of the southern plantation and the nostalgia of earlier plantation literature. He has also co-edited the essay collection Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (U of Virginia P, 2007) and the first reprint of Arna Bontemp's 1936 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Drums at Dusk (LSU Press, 2009).

Currently, Bibler is co-editing a collection of over thirty essays for Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic, and he has begun work on a new monograph entitled “Nation of a Queer Place”: Superabundance, the U.S. South, and the Plantationocene.

Area(s) of Interest

19th and 20th century American literature, Southern Studies, Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies