Michael D. Aeschliman

Michael D. Aeschliman (born 21 February 1948) is a U.S.–Swiss educator, literary critic and scholar, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, Professor of Anglophone Culture at the "Università della Svizzera italiana" (University of Italian Switzerland) and Curriculum Advisor to The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) Foundation Board. He is one of the four sons of the Swiss-American Protestant minister, linguist, aviator, soldier, college professor, and writer Rev. Adrien R. Aeschliman (1899–1981) and Dorothy G. (Schumacher) Aeschliman (1919–2006). Aeschliman taught at the University of Virginia from 1985–1993. He was a very popular undergraduate teacher and in 1990 the University of Virginia student weekly newsmagazine “The Declaration” featured him as the ”Hottest/Coolest Male Professor” in the University. He ran a summer institute in Italy for the University's Jefferson Scholars Program, 1996–2009, and also taught at the Catholic University of Milan (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) and the "Université populaire de Lausanne". He completed the college preparatory program and graduated from Tilton School (NH) in 1966. Aeschliman holds B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University (New York), where he studied with Edward W. Tayler, Joseph A. Mazzeo, Lionel Trilling, and Fritz Stern.
Aeschliman is the author of "The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case against Scientism" (3rd. edition, 2019; translated into French, 2020), which has been described by "National Review" (NY) as "a book marked by tremendous learning worn lightly, deployed vigorously, and offered generously to a generation that has forgotten how to think because it has lost its grip on the meaning of words." The major French daily newspaper "Le Figaro" also hailed its publication, describing it as a work that "at long last makes accessible to the general reading public the essential reflections of C. S. Lewis on scientism and transhumanism." The first edition was prefaced by the prominent journalist and intellectual Malcolm Muggeridge and praised by Russell Kirk as "One of the most perceptive books on C. S. Lewis," and "A succinct, strong book, worthy of Lewis himself." Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012) wrote that: "The long overdue reappraisal of C.S. Lewis as a serious social critic and public intellectual has been much helped by Michael Aeschliman's incisive monograph."
Aeschliman writes regularly on educational and cultural topics for several American magazines, including "National Review", "First Things", "Modern Age", "Crisis Magazine" and "The Journal of Education" (Boston). His work has also been published in "Essays in Criticism" (Oxford), "The Literary Criterion" (Mysore, India), "Semiotica" (Toronto), "The Imaginative Conservative", "The University Bookman" (Mecosta, Michigan), "L'Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria" (Milan) and "Evolution News and Science Today" (Seattle). His evocative analysis of the deleterious impact of television in Tuscany, "A cold, gray glow" ("Harper's", 1985), attracted early attention to his views. He has been a contributing author of "This Will Hurt - The Restoration of Virtue & Civic Order" and "The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia". He is featured in the film "The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism" (2012) In addition to C.S. Lewis, Aeschliman has written and lectured extensively about G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and John Henry Newman. In 1987, he brought out and introduced a new edition of Malcolm Muggeridge's 1934 satirical-documentary novel "Winter in Moscow," and in 2012 he brought out a new critical edition of Dickens's classic 1859 novel on the French Revolution, "A Tale of Two Cities." He has lectured by invitation in recent years at Cambridge and Yale Universities.