1 | Name: | Dr. Arnold Rampersad | |
Institution: | Stanford University | ||
Year Elected: | 1995 | ||
Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
Subdivision: | 402a | ||
Residency: | Resident | ||
Living? : | Living | ||
Birth Date: | 1941 | ||
Arnold Rampersad is the leading scholar of his generation in the field of African-American literature. His work on such major figures as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois is widely recognized as scholarship of the highest order, marked as it is by impeccable research and an elegant prose style. Dr. Rampersad's two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes (1986-88) is widely praised as a masterpiece of literary/historical narrative, and his mastery of this form was also evident in Days of Grace (1993), a memoir written with the assistance of the late Arthur Ashe. His latest work is Visible Man, a biography of Ralph Ellison. Currently Professor of English, Senior Associate Dean and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Dr. Rampersad has also served on the faculties of the University of Virginia and Rutgers, Columbia and Princeton Universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he has also edited several other works, including Slavery and the Literary Imagination and Race and American Culture. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Dr. Rampersad has made the study of African-American culture an integral part of intellectual life. He was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Obama. He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2012 and was awarded the Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University in 2013. |