Walter Benn Michaels has just completed a new book, The Beauty of a Social Problem; Photography, Autonomy and Political Economy, forthcoming in Spring 2015 from the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, and The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.