Rate My Professor Michael Call

Michael J. Call is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University, where he also contributes to the Office of Digital Humanities. He earned a Ph.D. in French from Yale University in 2006, an M.Phil. in 2005, an M.A. in 2002, and a B.A. summa cum laude in French and Humanities from Brigham Young University in 2000. Call joined Brigham Young University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature in September 2006 and was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters in September 2014.

His research interests encompass 17th-century French art and literature, the history of the book, theories of authorship, and the cultural history of risk, chance, and determinism. Call is the author of the book The Would-Be Author: Molière and the Comedy of Print (Purdue University Press, 2015). Selected publications include “Of Sceptics and Spectators: Les Amants magnifiques and the Wonders of Disenchantment” (Early Modern French Studies, 2018), “Calculated Losses: Molière, Regnard, and the Changing Comic Gamblers of Seventeenth-Century France” in Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (2019), “Comedic Wars, Serious Moralists: Genre, Gender, and Molière’s L’École des femmes” (Yale French Studies, 2016), “Money for Nothing: Molière’s Miser and the Risky World of Early Modern France” (Quidditas, 2011), and “Alceste at the Print Shop: Publication and Authorship in Molière’s Le Misanthrope” (Romanic Review, 2013). He has presented papers at conferences such as the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, the Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies, and the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association on topics including Molière’s publications, comedic gambling, and authorship debates.

Call has received the 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University, the 2016 Alcuin Fellowship for contributions to undergraduate General Education and Honors programs, the 2011 Allen DuPont Breck Award from the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, and the 2007 Marguerite A. Peyre Dissertation Prize from Yale University’s French Department. He teaches courses including IHum 201 and 202: Western Humanities 1 and 2, IHum 280R: The Humanities and Popular Culture: Games and Play, IHum 420R/French 454R: Molière: Comedy, Print, and Performance, Fren 425R/630R: Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales, and IHum 490R/690R: Authorship.