Michael Dango is a scholar of contemporary art and literature (primarily but not exclusively from the United States) and its intersection with feminist political theory, especially theories of violence, Marxist feminism, and racial capitalism. His work is broadly taxonomic in nature, exploring the entanglement of aesthetic categories (such as genres, styles, and judgments) and political categories (such as "violence against women").

His first book, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford, 2021), offers a taxonomy of style in contemporary fiction, sculpture, television, and design. Theorizing style as action, the book explores how four stylistic actions—detoxing, bingeing, filtering, and ghosting—have emerged to respond to a sense of pervasive political, economic, social, and environmental crisis. His second book, the 33 1/3 volume on Madonna’s Erotica, explores the politics of sex in the wake of the AIDS crisis and the 1990s culture wars—and why all this is pressing today amidst renewed hysteria over queer theory and critical race theory. Currently, he is at work on new books theorizing contemporary systems of genre and humanistic contributions to the movement against sexual violence. Pieces from these projects have appeared in academic journals such as PMLA, differences, New Literary History, Signs, and Social Text, as well as para-academic forums such as Public Books, New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.