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)[1] and Curriculum Advisor to The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) Foundation Board.[2] 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, 1985-1993, and ran a summer institute in Italy for the University’s Jefferson Scholars Program, 1996-2009.[3] He completed the college preparatory program and graduated from Tilton School 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."[4] 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."[5] 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.”[6] 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."[7]

Aeschliman writes regularly on educational and cultural topics for several American magazines, including National Review,[8] First Things,[9][10] Modern Age,[11] and The Journal of Education (Boston),[12]; his evocative analysis of the deleterious impact of television in Tuscany, "A cold, gray glow" (Harper's, 1985),[13] attracted early attention to his views. He has been a contributing author of This Will Hurt - The Restoration of Virtue & Civic Order[14] and The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia.[15] He is featured in the film "The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism" (2012)[16][17] In addition to C.S. Lewis, Aeschliman has written and lectured extensively about G. K. Chesterton,[18][19] T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis[20] and John Henry Newman.[21] In 1987, he brought out and introduced a new edition of Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1934 satirical-documentary novel Winter in Moscow,[22] 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.[23]