Michael is a scholar, educator, and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. As a child growing up in Nebraska, he developed a passion for foreign languages (particularly Italian) while listening to his Sicilian grandparents speak their native dialect with his mother.

 

After completing an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Nebraska, he studied for a year at the University of Florence in Italy. Having received a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, he moved to Seattle, where he completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington.

 

He taught as an assistant professor in the literature and religious studies programs at Eugene Lang College in New York. His research focuses on the history of Christianity and queerness, and bears witness to his interest in the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religion.  He is a co-editor and contributor to the book Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms (NYU Press, 2015), and is on the steering committee for the Gay Men and Religion program unit of the American Academy of Religion.

 

He is frequently a guest instructor at John Cabot University in Rome, where he teaches a course on the history of the Papacy. He is committed to the creation of learning communities across geographical, linguistic, and religious boundaries.