Dominick Lacapra

Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph. D. from Harvard. He began teaching at the Cornell University Department of History in 1969 and is currently Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. He has received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

LaCapra’s work helped to transform intellectual history and its relations to cultural history as well as other approaches to the past. He integrated into his own work recent developments in critical theory, such as poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and indicated their relevance for the rethinking of history. He also demonstrated the use in historical studies of techniques developed in literary studies and aesthetics, such as close reading and the role of a critical approach to the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production, reception, and circulation.

In addition to its significance in the historical profession, LaCapra’s work has been widely discussed in other humanistic and social-scientific disciplines. He has made contributions to Holocaust studies, French studies, the history of philosophy, the history of social theory and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and comparative literature. At Cornell, he holds a joint appointment in Comparative Literature is a member of the graduate fields of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies.

At Cornell LaCapra has also served for two years as Acting Director and for ten years as Director of the Society for the Humanities, which brings together scholars from Cornell and other universities to work on various themes. As Director, LaCapra acted as coordinator of events and as an important animator at the seminars, conferences, and lectures sponsored or co-sponsored by the Society. In addition, LaCapra is a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory. He was its associate director from 1996-2000, and from 2000-2008 its director. SCT was founded in 1976 by a group of leading humanistic scholars (including Meyer H. Abrams, Hazard Adams, Northrop Frye, Geoffrey Hartman, Murray Krieger, and Hayden White) in the conviction that theory, criticism, and research are interrelated and mutually reinforcing activities. With LaCapra's participation, SCT has turned more significantly to history and the social sciences as well as continuing to foster innovative thought in literary studies and critical theory.

References

Discussions and uses of LaCapra’s work may be found in:Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 6 and 7François Dosse, La marche de idées: Histoire des intellectuals — histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Editions Découverte, 2003)Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2003)Josua Hirsch: After

Rethinking History [5] 8 (2004) contains an essay LaCapra was invited by the editors to write ("Tropisms of Intellectual History," 499-529) that retrospectively reflects on his work and critiques of it. The issue also includes four essays that respond to LaCapra’s contribution and provide appraisals of his role in the historical profession and the academy:Ernst van Alphen, “In Acknowledgement of the Other,” 559-66Carolyn J. Dean, “Intellectual History and the Prominence of ‘Things That Matter’,” 537-47Allan Megill, “Intellectual History and History,” 549-57Michael Roth, “Opposition from Within,” 531-35

Books by LaCapra

1) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972; reissued in 1985 by University of Chicago Press; revised edition in 2001 by The Davies Group)

2) A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)

3) “Madame Bovary" on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)

4) Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983)

5) History & Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

6) History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)

7) Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)

8) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)

9) History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)

10) History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

11) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

12) History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)

-Edited [with S. L. Kaplan] : Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)

-Edited: The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)