Amico, Michael

PhD, American Studies, Yale University (2017)

• Graduate Certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Dissertation: The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the "Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy" of the American Civil War

MA, American Studies, Yale University (2012)
MPhil, American Studies, Yale University (2012)
BA, Dartmouth College (2007)

• Senior Fellow (In lieu of a major, Senior Fellowships are awarded for projects “with an intellectual scope and breadth of imagination beyond the existing curriculum.")
• Thesis: Better Safe Than Gay: How the Imperative to “Be Safe” Has Increased the Danger of Being Gay

Projects

The Birth of a Union: Theatricality, Sympathy, and Anti-Slavery in the Coming of America’s Civil War, 1830-1860

The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War

Selected Literature

Books

• 2013: “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, Boston: Beacon Press
  
* Finalist for 2013 Lambda Literary Awards, LGBT Nonfiction

   * Starred Publishers Weekly review
  
* Excerpted in The Nation, Slate, Salon, Huffington Post, and Religion Dispatches

Articles/Chapters

• 2023: "The Unruly Dance of Sympathy: Blackface, Anti-Slavery Sentiment, and Uncle Tom's Cabin on the Stage in Antebellum America," part of MPiB HoE Collaborative Project Changing the Feeling Rules: How Emotions Reshape Social Relations, c. 1700 to today, currently under review for publication in Social Science History
• 2022: "Feeling Political Through the Radio: President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, 1933–1944," Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions Since 1789, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 159-188
• 2017: “The Pulpit of Henry Trumbull,” Experience, Edited by Alexander Nemerov, Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, pp. 78-98
• 2011: “James Mars,” “Prudence Crandall,” and “Marian Anderson,” historical meditations on sites along the Connecticut Freedom Trail, “Freedom’s Journey: Poems and Meditations on African American Legacies in Connecticut," Curated by Laura Wexler and Elizabeth Alexander, a project of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, privately printed
• 2006: “Whorified Virgins: Gay Youth and Sex,” Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, 2nd Edition, Edited by Mindy Stombler, et. al. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 212-216
  

Book Reviews/Essays

• 2018: "Melodrama and the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage: How what we think is at the mercy of how we feel," including review of Accidental Activists: Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas by David Collins, The Common Reader
• 2017: "Abraham Lincoln’s Best Friend: President Lincoln’s remarkable male friendship and the boundaries of 19th-century sex," including review of Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed by Charles Strozier, The Common Reader
• 2017: "Gay Liberation as the Quest For Community: A new book provides a different take on gay American history," including review of Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation by Jim Downs, The Common Reader
• 2010: Review of Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities by Julie Abraham, Lambda Literary Review
• 2010: Review of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Lambda Literary Review

Listen to my interviews of authors of new books in many of the above research areas, part of the New Books Network of podcasts.
And check out a special podcast I co-wrote and co-produced for C19 (The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists), "Networked Connections: Exploring Emily Dickinson in 1862," in which we integrated found texts and sound (the human voice, ambient noise, processed sound, silence) to explore how meanings and feelings stick to sound, and how sound can change them.