Biography
Delbanco was born in White Plains, New York, the son of Jewish parents who fled from Germany to England before emigrating to the U.S. after the Second World War. He attended Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York, and received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in English in 1973 from Harvard University, from which he also received his MA (1976) and PhD (1980). Delbanco taught at Harvard from 1981 to 1985 and since 1985 has been on the faculty of Columbia University, where, for twenty years, he held the Julian Clarence Levi Chair in the Humanities and, from 2005 to 2015, was the Mendelson Family Director of American Studies. He is the inaugural holder of the Alexander Hamilton Chair of American Studies, established at Columbia in 2015.
While serving as a trustee of the National Humanities Center (1996-2006), he chaired the Education Committee, which was instrumental in developing the center's work with high school teachers. Upon his appointment in 2018 to the presidency of the Teagle Foundation, he said that his aim was "to continue and deepen Teagle's support of people and programs committed to bringing the gift of liberal education to all students -- not just the privileged few". [3]
In 2015, Delbanco gave a mini-lecture on Moby-Dick while riding with Stephen Colbert on the Nitro roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in New Jersey. [4]
Writings
Delbanco’s early work, The Puritan Ordeal (1989), approaches New England Puritanism as a religious movement seeking moral stability in the context of nascent capitalism. In 1995 he published The Death of Satan, a study of changing concepts of evil in American history. The Real American Dream (1999) is an essay on spiritual longing in American life. Melville: His World and Work (2005), a critical study cast in the form of biography, portrays Herman Melville as a uniquely inventive literary artist who combined the moral gravity of the New England tradition with the irreverent energy of a New York sensibility. The War Before the War (2018), a narrative account of how fugitives from slavery helped drive the nation to civil war, stresses the conflict between law and conscience in the minds of judges, writers, clergy, and politicians who tried to reconcile private conviction with public duty.
Delbanco writes frequently about higher education. In a controversial article published in 1999 in The New York Review of Books, he attributed to the contemporary English department “the contradictory attributes of a religion in its late phase—a certain desperation to attract converts, combined with an evident lack of convinced belief in its own scriptures and traditions.” [7] In subsequent articles, and in his book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), based on the Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton, he traced the origins, development, and current state of higher education in the U.S..
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death Melville was not well known to the public, but 1919, the centennial of his birth, was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
James Munro McPherson is an American historian specializing in the American Civil War. He is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. McPherson was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003.
Jonathan Kozol is an American writer, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States.
Roger Kimball is an American art critic and conservative social commentator. He is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the publisher of Encounter Books. Kimball first gained notice in the early 1990s with the publication of his book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education.
Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is the seventh book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The novel, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanly, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancée; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment and incidentally work some personal experience into the novel.
George Jack Makari is a psychiatrist and historian. He serves as director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, which encompasses the Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also a Professor of Psychiatry. Makari's work has been widely reviewed, and he is well known among historians of the mind sciences, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for Revolution in Mind, The Creation of Psychoanalysis and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. His recent work, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, won the 87th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in the nonfiction category. He was the Director and Attending Psychiatrist of a sliding scale Psychotherapy Clinic at Payne Whitney Clinic from 1991-2016.
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume (1986) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
Evert Augustus Duyckinck was an American publisher and biographer. He was associated with the literary side of the Young America movement in New York.
Judith R. Shapiro is a former President of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women at Columbia University. Prior to her role at Barnard, she had a teaching career as a cultural anthropologist at Bryn Mawr College and The University of Chicago. She served as president of the Teagle Foundation from 2013-2018.
Andrew Solomon is an American writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.
"Isle of the Cross" is a possible unpublished and lost work by Herman Melville, which would have been his eighth book, coming after the commercial and critical failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). Melville biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the work, perhaps a novel, perhaps a story, was what had been known as the "story of Agatha," completed around May 1853. He further suggests that finishing the work showed that Melville had not, as many biographers argued, been discouraged and turned away from fiction.
Russell Jacoby is an American academic and a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cultural history, specifically the history of intellectuals and education. At these points, his work, however, also crosses over into the sociology of knowledge.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Nicholas Delbanco is an American writer.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is an American poet, writer, editor, and translator. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, the poetry editor of The New Republic, and the editor of Princeton University Press' Princeton Series of Contemporary Poetry. He is President of the Board of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. and, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).
Jon Parrish Peede is an American book editor and literary review publisher, who served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2018 to 2021.
Melinda S. Zook is a historian, academic, and author. She is the Director of Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts within the College of Liberal Arts and the Germaine Seelye Oesterle Professor of History in the Department of History at Purdue University.
