Michael Butter has been Professor of American Literary and Cultural History at the University of Tübingen since 2014. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn in 2007 and his Habilitation from the University of Freiburg in 2012. He is the author of six monographs: The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002 (New York: Palgrave, 2009), Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), Der »Washington-Code«: Zur Heroisierung amerikanischer Präsidenten, 1775-1865 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), “Nichts ist, wie es scheint”: Über Verschwörungstheorien (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), a German introduction to conspiracy theories aimed at a general audience, which was translated into Polish, Portoguese and English as The Nature of Conspiracy Theories (London: Polity, 2020), From Panem to the Pandemic: An Introduction to Cultural Studies (Tübingen: Narr, 2023), a textbook for first-year students, and Die Alarmierten: Was Verschwörungstheorien anrichten (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2025).
Michael Butter was Vice Chair of the COST Action "Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories" (COMPACT, 2016-20), Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Populism and Conspiracy Theory” (PACT, 2020-25) and one of the PIs of the CHANSE project “Researching Europe, Digitalisation and Conspiracy Theory” (REDACT, 2022-2025).
His expertise is frequently sought by media outlets in Germany, Europe and North America, and he has contributed op-eds to, among others, Die Zeit, FAZ, Der Spiegel and The Conversation. In July 2021, he was awarded the Tübingen Prize for Knowledge Communication. Since 2023, Michael Butter has been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
