Jonathan Arac

Columbia has named Jonathan Arac, an expert on 19th century British and American culture and literature, chairman of the University's English and comparative literature department, beginning July 1, 2001.

Arac, who has been at the University of Pittsburgh for the past decade, was a member of the Columbia faculty from 1987 to 1990.

"I am pleased to welcome Jonathan Arac on his return to the Columbia community," said President George Rupp. "His record of scholarship and achievement will be an enormous asset as we take the next steps in continuing the proud traditions of our English department."

Provost Jonathan Cole said, "Professor Arac is a leader in his field. He will undoubtedly build upon the English department's reputation as having one of the finest programs in the country."

David Cohen, vice president for arts and sciences, added: "We are, indeed, fortunate to have attracted Jonathan Arac back to Columbia. In pursuing a chair for the department, we sought to recruit an individual with scholarly distinction, whose achievements would command the respect of the diverse disciplines in the field, and with the leadership ability to assure that the department of English and comparative literature at Columbia will continue to enjoy its longstanding reputation as among the best in the world. In Jonathan Arac, I believe we have successfully found all of these qualities."

Arac said he looks forward to his return to Columbia.

"Columbia has a superlative faculty and student base, and a longstanding commitment to serious general education," said Arac. "Chairing the department gives me the opportunity to help what has been one of the three or four most important departments in the history of the field."

"The University's and department's existing strengths provide a basis from which Columbia can reach forward to become the best English department in the world," he added. "In their teaching and writing, our faculty deeply shares several commitments: the close analysis of verbal texts and works; awareness of how those works and texts arise from and act upon a larger world of human activity; and convictions that what we learn from the study of other times and places makes an important difference to how we think and act in the world today."

Arac has won several grants and fellowships, including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Information Agency, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ford Foundation.

"The humanities, more than any other area of research, intimately combines as its core the intense experience of strong affect--pity, terror, pleasure--with the intellectual quest for understanding," Arac said.

His authored works include Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (Columbia University Press, 1987) and Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (Columbia University Press, 1979).

Arac has also edited several books, including Postmodernism and Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (Rutgers University Press, 1988).

He is currently working on a book project that analyzes the emergence in American intellectual life of the term "identity". Among the key figures in Arac's study are Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, Robert Penn Warren, poet, critic, and author of All the King's Men, and Erik Erikson, the child analyst who coined the term "identity crisis".

Classics Professor Roger Bagnall has been serving as acting chair of the department. "Professor Roger Bagnall is serving the department extraordinarily effectively as the acting chair," Cohen said. "Professor Arac will relieve him of that responsibility at the end of this academic year."