Lawrence L. Langer

Lawrence L. Langer (born 1929) is an American scholar, Holocaust analyst, and professor of English and Holocaust education.[1]

Early life and education

Lawrence L. Langer was born to Irving and Esther Langer in New York City. He received his BA from City College of New York in 1951. Langer received his Master of Arts in 1952 and PhD in 1961, both from Harvard University.[2]

Biography

Career Beginnings

In 1963, Langer received a Fulbright lectureship to the University of Graz in Austria to teach American literature.[3] While there, a colleague asked him if he wanted to visit Auschwitz and he accepted the offer. In May of 1964, he visited Auschwitz, which was deserted apart from Soviet soldiers.[4] After a few years, he took a sabbatical in Germany from 1968-1969 and when he returned in June, he had completed 90% of his first book on Holocaust literature, titled “The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.”[2]

Career

Between 1976 and 1992, Langer returned to Simmons College and continued there as a Professor of English and Holder of the Alumnae Endowed Chair.[1] Presently, Langer remains the Alumnae Chair Professor of English, emeritus.[5] In Fall 2002, Langer was a Strassler Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.[6]

Awards

Langer received an NEH Fellowship for Independent Studies and Research between 1978 and 1979.[7] Between September and December of 1996, he was the JB & Maurice Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the US Holocaust Research Center of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.[8] From September to December of 1997, Lawrence L. Langer was prestigiously named as a Koerner Fellow for the Study of the Holocaust, Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Yarnton Manor, Oxford, England.[9] In May 2003, Langer served as the Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.[10] In 1996, Lawrence L. Langer was awarded the honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters from Simmons College, which he also received in 2000 from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and in 2002 from Ohio Wesleyan University.[11]

References

External Links