Michelle Yates

Michelle Yates is Lecturer in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago.

Dr. Yates received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California Davis in June 2012. She earned a B.A. with honors in Women's Studies from Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Yates' dissertation, titled Ecological Crisis: Nature, Labor, and the Historical Specificity of Capitalism, draws on a methodology she calls green Marxist cultural studies in order to demonstrate how the ecological is intimately linked to the political, economic, and cultural aspects of American social life. Drawing on a range of political economic, Marxian, and environmentalist theory in conjunction with cultural texts and environmentalist media, the project asks, what can we learn about contemporary environmental degradation, who is most affected, and how to solve it, by studying the way capitalist society functions as a mode of production and not just as a mode of consumption or distribution?

Dr. Yates has had her work published in the social geography journal Antipode and in a recent anthology The Renewal of Cultural Studies. She has delivered papers at numerous national conferences, including the Cultural Studies Association, American Studies Association, Marxist Literary Group Institute on Culture and Society, and the Association for American Geographers.

At Columbia, Dr. Yates will be teaching Introduction to Cultural Studies, Cultural Theories, and the senior-level Capstone I: Proposal Writing.

Prior to coming to Columbia, Dr. Yates designed and taught a number of courses at University of California Davis, including Introduction to Film Studies, Representations of the Environment in American Film History, U.S. Science Fiction Film, Objects and Everyday Life: Garbage, Junk, and Refuse, The Individual and Community in U.S. Culture, and Nature and Culture.

Contact Dr. Yates:

Mail:
Dr. Michelle Yates
Columbia College Chicago
Department of HHSS
600 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL
60605

Phone:
312.369.7382

Email:
myates@colum.edu