Biography
Harrison was born in İzmir,Turkey,where he lived until the age of twelve. [5]
Following the death of his American father,Harrison moved with his family to Rome,the native city of his Italian mother. [6] He attended the Overseas School of Rome,an international school where he studied under teachers from diverse backgrounds,including the Irish poet Desmond O’Grady. [7] Harrison has often credited this period,particularly the influence of his English teachers in the early 1970s,with shaping his literary sensibilities. [5]
He went on to pursue higher education in the United States,earning a bachelor’s degree in Humanities from Santa Clara University in 1976. [8] After a period of exploration,he entered graduate school at Cornell University,where he completed a doctorate in Romance Studies in 1984 with a dissertation on Dante’s Vita Nuova. [9]
In 1985,he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. [10] In 1986,he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992,and was promoted to full professor in 1995. [5] In 1997,Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002,he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian,which he continued to be until 2010. In September 2014,he once again became chair of the department. [11] He retired in 2024 and is now professor emeritus. [8]
He began his academic career as a Dante scholar,publishing The Body of Beatrice in 1988. His work quickly expanded to concern itself broadly with the Western literary and philosophical tradition,focusing on the human place in nature and what he calls "the humic foundations" of human culture. [12]
In 1992,he published Forests:The Shadow of Civilization,a wide-ranging history of the religious,mythological,literary,and philosophical role of forests in the Western imagination.
In 2003,he published The Dominion of the Dead,in which he probes the relations the living have maintained with the dead in a number of secular domains,among them burial places,houses,testaments,images,dreams,and political institutions.
In his book Gardens:An Essay on the Human Condition (2008),Harrison focused on the role that care and cultivation play in human culture,arguing that gardens embody "the vocation of care" that defines the inner core of our humanity. [5]
He also contributed several essays to the New York Review of Books,to which he has been a regular contributor since 2009. He has written essays on John Muir,Theodore Roosevelt,Ralph Waldo Emerson,Giacomo Leopardi,Dante Alighieri,Harold Bloom,the King James Bible,America's natural history,and Margaret Fuller. He also recently contributed a critique of Silicon Valley culture to the New York Review of Books online blog. [13]
He has also contributed to the Financial Times,reviewing an English-language translation of Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone. [14]
