Michael Lempert is Professor of linguistic anthropology, at the University of Michigan. He is affiliated with the Center for South Asian Studies and interdisciplinary programs in Anthropology and History.

A linguistic and cultural anthropologist with cross-disciplinary interests, he has trained in several fields, and has written on a wide range of topics concerned with social interaction. These include gesture and embodied communication; multimodal research; liberalism and deliberative democracy; technosemiotics and the human-media interface; Buddhist modernism; and listening.

He is author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (University of California Press, 2012; recipient of the 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize), coauthor (with Michael Silverstein) of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency (Indiana University Press, 2012), and coeditor (with E. Summerson Carr) of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (University of California Press, 2016). He has also written his ground breaking From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale, which traces how face-to-face interaction became a scaled object of knowledge in mid-twentieth century America. With Miyako Inoue (Stanford, Anthropology) and others, he has been involved in collaborative work. One of his recent projects, supported by The Wenner-Gren Foundation, is a team-based ethnography of liberal listening on a college campus.