Philip E. Lewis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip E. Lewis is an educational administrator and former professor of Romance Studies.
Effective, Feb. 1, 2007, Lewis is vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Liberal Arts Colleges Program.[1]
Born in Kingsport, Tennessee, Lewis earned his bachelor's degree from Davidson College in 1964 and his doctorate from Yale University in 1969. Known for his work in 17th-century French literature and contemporary critical theory and practice, he is the author of La Rochefoucauld: The Art of Abstraction (1977) and Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault (1996). He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Danforth Fellow and Research Fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the editor of Diacritics, a journal of criticism produced in the Department of Romance Studies and published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lewis has served on the Cornell University faculty since 1968 and chaired the Department of Romance Studies for the better part of two decades. Before becoming acting dean in 1995, he served as an associate dean under two consecutive college leaders. Lewis served as dean of the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences from 1996 to 2003. In 2003, Lewis resigned as Dean in a dispute with the central administration citing "irreconcilable differences in our viewpoints."[2] In 2005, Lecture Hall D in Goldwin Smith Hall has been renamed and dedicated as the Philip E. Lewis Lecture Hall, in honor Lewis, through the generosity of Robert Katz '69 and his wife, Jane Katz.[3]