Dominick LaCapra

Dominick LaCapra received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph. D. from Harvard. He is currently the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is member of the field of Romance Studies and the Program in Jewish Studies. At Cornell he received  the Clark Award for distinguished teaching. He also served for two years as Acting Director and for ten as Director of Cornell's Society for the Humanities. In addition, LaCapra is a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT), was SCT's Associate Director from 1996 to 2000, and has been its Director since 2000. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

LaCapra has edited The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (1991) and with Steven L. Kaplan co-edited Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives. He has written Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (1972), A Preface to Sartre (1978), "Madame Bovary" on Trial (1982), Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983), History and Criticism (1985), History, Politics, and the Novel (1987), Soundings in Critical Theory (1989), Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory.  (All the above books were published by Cornell University Press.) He has also written History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000 and Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).             

LaCapra's work is discussed in many books and articles, two of which may deserve special mention. Elizabeth A. Clark's History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Harvard University Press, 2004) provides a critical survey of recent developments in intellectual and cultural history and places LaCapra's work in this context.  Rethinking History 8 (2004) contains an essay by LaCapra ("Tropisms of Intellectual History") that retrospectively reflects on his work as well as four essays that respond to it and provide appraisals of his role in the profession (by Ernst van Alphen, Carolyn Dean, Allan Megill, and Michael Roth).

Panel speaker: Monday, April 30 at 10 a.m.
"Witnessing, Testimony, Commentary"

Annette Wieviorka has recently referred to the present as the "era of the witness." Others, such as Geoffrey Hartman and Aleida Assmann, have presented testimony as a new genre-in-the-making that characterizes this era. Of course testimonies and witnesses have existed in other times and places. But the extent and intensity of traumatic events and experiences, notably including genocides as well as other forms of abuse and victimization, seem to mark our time in a distinctive manner and to lend credibility to its prevalent figuration as the era or age of the witness who gives testimony. This paper explores the complex, controversial relations among the processes of bearing witness, giving testimony, and offering various types of commentary.