Dr. Michael Hrebeniak

Dr Michael Hrebeniak is Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in English at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Lecturer in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He read English as an undergraduate at King's College London, before undertaking PhD research in American Literature. In 1994 he was appointed to the first Lecturership in Humanities at the Royal Academy of Music, and this is where he remained until 2003. His first book, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2006 and nominated for a MLA prize, and it has just been revised and republished as a softback. He is currently working on two new books: a study of ecological currents in postwar American poetry, and a psychogeographical account of the medieval Stourbridge Fair. In 2007 he co-organised the Passionate Natures - Ecology and the Imagination conference on behalf of the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. His academic career has co-existed alongside subterranean activities as a saxophonist, jazz journalist, an obituary writer for the Guardian, researcher for the Arts Council, editor and publisher of Radical Poetics, and producer of poetry CDs and arts documentaries for Channel 4 TV on behalf of Optic Nerve. From 2002 to 2007 he was Visiting Fellow at the Praxis Centre at Cranfield University School of Management, where he researched the yoking of the arts to the fostering of creativity and sustainability across organisations, including central government.