Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is an American academic who served as president and director of the National Humanities Center from 2002–15. One of the characteristics of his tenure was the encouragement of dialogue between the humanities on the one hand and the natural and social sciences on the other. He is a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and also a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.
His book, The Humanities and the Dream of America, was published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2011.
Books
- On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. 2nd ed. with new preface. This work was the primary inspiration for “Domus Aurea,” a composition by Edmund Campion for piano and vibraphone, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, November 4, 2000.
- The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism.
- Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics. Partially translated into Croatian as Pripovjedni Imperative, in Politika ietika pripovijedanja, ed. Vladimir Biti, 129–56.
- One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad.
- Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society.
- Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity.
- A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed., coauthored with M.H. Abrams ; 9th ed.. Translated into Persian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Greek. Indian edition, 2009.
- The Character of Criticism.
- On Being Human, special issue of Daedalus, 138.3, consulting editor. This issue grew out of the “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities” initiative sponsored by the National Humanities Center, 2006–09.
- The Humanities and the Dream of America.
- Scholarship and Freedom.
- Citizenship on Catfish Row: Race and Nation in American Popular Culture.
- Theories of Race, at: theoriesofrace.com
Critical studies and reviews of Harpham's work
- Review of What do you think, Mr. Ramirez?.