Rate My Professor Michael Lipkin

Michael Lipkin is the Academic Director and Senior Instructional Professor of the Program for Public Thinking at the University of Chicago Parrhesia. His teaching and scholarship explore the relationship between literary techniques, cultural formations, and public thought, especially at times of crisis. He writes actively about culture and politics for American and European publications, such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Left Review, the Merkur, and many others. His scholarly writing has appeared in Colloquia Germanica and the German Studies Review. His translation of Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth (Tadellöser & Wolff) was published with New York Review Books Classics in 2023. At Parrhesia, he is responsible for the academic curriculum of the Program for Public Thinking, developing courses where students learn about the history and practice of public thinking, from the agora to social media, and have the chance to bring debates from their lives and studies to a wider world. He also serves as Associate Senior Instructor & Academic Director of the Program for Public Thinking in the College.

Lipkin holds a B.A. from Binghamton University and M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from Columbia University. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Hamilton College, where he helped design and expand the German program. His areas of expertise include literary realism, ethics, the political and social history of Germany, and documentary literature. The Program for Public Thinking, launched in 2023 as a joint project with The Point magazine, aims to cultivate habits of thought associated with liberal arts education, including analytic rigor, interpretive generosity, the ability to test one’s own convictions, and appreciation for a plurality of coherent philosophical, religious, and political viewpoints.