Department Faculty

“My undergraduate and early graduate studies were centered in European intellectual history, religious studies, and art history, with a concentration on British literature, 1660-1822. I was early influenced by James G. Frazier's The Golden Bough, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and all historical and linguistic approaches to language and literature. My fascination with classical and Germanic mythology led me as an adult to spend as much time as possible in Europe. In later years, while teaching at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna, I was able to conduct office hours in German. I have painfully achieved a more limited but passable, ability to read and write French, by taking language courses at the Catholic University of Paris.

“My publishing specialty has emphasized the intellectual culture of Afro-American elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My studies in political and economic thought are consistently integrated with my artistic and literary interests. For the past decade my teaching has focused on the United States, 1787 to 1848. I am currently writing articles on Benjamin Franklin and W. E. B. Du Bois, for the Cambridge University press, and completing a book on European influences on American literary and intellectual history during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.”