Dominick LaCapra

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Dominick LaCapra is a well-renowned Intellectual Historian and the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph. D. from Harvard. He began teaching at the Cornell University Department of History in 1969 and . He has received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

LaCapra’s work helped to transform intellectual history and its relations to cultural history as well as other approaches to the past. He integrated into his own work recent developments in critical theory, such as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, and indicated their relevance for the rethinking of history. He also demonstrated the use in historical studies of techniques developed in literary studies and aesthetics, such as close reading and the role of a critical approach to the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production, reception, and circulation. In addition to his role in the historical profession, LaCapra has also had considerable influence in other humanistic and social-scientific disciplines. He has made contributions to Holocaust studies, French studies, the history of philosophy, the history of social theory and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and comparative literature. At Cornell, he holds a joint appointment in Comparative Literature is a member of the graduate fields of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies.

At Cornell, LaCapra has also served for two years as Acting Director and for ten years as Director of the Society for the Humanities. Each year the Society brings to Cornell nine or ten visiting year- or semester-long external fellows as well as from four to eight Cornell faculty. Moreover, it includes four or five Mellon postdoctoral fellows in its programs. As Director, LaCapra acted as coordinator of events in the humanities and as an important animator at the seminars, conferences, and lectures sponsored or co-sponsored by the Society. In addition, LaCapra is a senior fellow of the [School of Criticism and Theory (SCT)]. He was its associate director from 1996-2000, and from 2000-2008 its director. He was instrumental in the move of SCT from Dartmouth College to Cornell University. SCT was founded in 1976 by a group of leading humanistic scholars in the conviction that theory, criticism, and research are interrelated and mutually reinforcing activities. From mid-June to the end of July, SCT brings together 80-100 participants -- both faculty and advanced graduate students -- from around the world to engage in a program of intensive seminars, colloquia, and lectures. With LaCapra's participation, SCT has turned more significantly to history and social science as well as continuing to foster innovative thought in literary studies.

[edit] References and Sources

The significance of LaCapra’s work has been discussed in many reviews, essays, and books, including Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Harvard University Press, 1995), Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), and Peter Novick[4], That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity" Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Elizabeth A. Clark's History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Harvard University Press, 2004) provides a critical survey of recent developments in intellectual and cultural history and places LaCapra's work in this context. Rethinking History [5]8 (2004) contains an essay LaCapra was invited by the editors to write ("Tropisms of Intellectual History") that retrospectively reflects on his work. The issue also includes four essays that respond to LaCapra’s contribution and provide appraisals of his role in the historical profession (by Ernst van Alphen, Carolyn Dean, Allan Megill, and Michael Roth). Bibliography

[edit] Publications

  • Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Cornell University Press, 1972; reissued in 1985 by University of Chicago Press; revised edition in 2001 by The Davies Group)
  • A Preface to Sartre (Cornell University Press, 1978)
  • Madame Bovary on Trial (Cornell University Press, 1982)
  • Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Cornell University Press, 1983)
  • History & Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1985)
  • History, Politics, and the Novel (Cornell University Press, 1987)
  • Soundings in Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 1989)
  • Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Cornell University Press, 1994)
  • History and Memory after Auschwitz (Cornell University Press, 1998)
  • History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
  • Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
  • History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2004)
  • Edited [with S. L. Kaplan]: Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 1982)
  • Edited: The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Cornell University Press, 1991)