Dr. Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is Director of American Studies at Columbia University and has been Columbia's Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities since 1995. He writes extensively on American literary and religious history.
A double graduate of Harvard University (BA and PhD), Delbanco has been teaching at Columbia University since 1985 and, since 1995, has been Columbia's Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities. In 2001 he was named by Time Magazine as "America's Best Social Critic",[1] and in 2003 was chosen New York State Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[2] he has served as vice president of PEN American Center and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1990),[3] the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Humanities Center (NHC).[4]
Delbanco's books The Puritan Ordeal (1989) and Melville: His World and Work (2005) received the Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia University. Only he and Edward Said have won the award twice. He is also the author of The Death of Satan (1995), Required Reading (1997), and The Real American Dream (1999). Among the books he has edited are Writing New England (2001), The Portable Abraham Lincoln (1992), The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (volume 2) (1990), and The Puritans in America (1985).
Delbanco's essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books,[5] The New Republic, and other journals, on topics ranging from American literary and religious history to contemporary issues in higher education.[4]