Since graduating with his PhD from Durham University in 2012 in Religious studies and the reception history of the study of early Christianity in 20th century Germany, Michael has embarked on a disciplinary nomadic existence. His first position was as a lecturer in New Testament Interpretation at Yale Divinity School where he also was a post-doc. From there he moved to Princeton University where he again was a lecturer but this time in ethics in the Religion Department. Michael remains at Princeton in a hybrid religion/sociology position where he is engaged in varying research project on labor disputes in antiquity through modernity. A recent recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt award, Michael spent the first year of the award in the Institut für antikes Judentum und hellenistische Religionsgeschichte at Tübingen Universität. And this year he is a visiting fellow in the Centre international d’étude de la philosophie française contemporaine at l'École normale supérieure, Paris.
His first book, Remembrance of things past? (2012) was a kind of social history of the rise of history-as-science in nineteenth and twentieth century Germany and the emergence of an “historical Jesus” discourse. His second book, The godman and the sea (2018) which he just finished reads varying representations of the sea in antiquity and early Christianity through the rubrics of desolation and trauma. His next volume is on the function of “smell” in antiquity as a form of ethical knowledge.
He has edited four other volumes and written several articles on topics ranging from suicide, politics, imaginaries of participation, labor, time and money, etc., which attempt to track genealogies and set into comparison the assemblages of philosophical questions.