Dominick C. LaCapra

Professor Dominick C. LaCapra was the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. He now is the Professor Emeritus of History and of Comparative Literature. LaCapra has a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a 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 to being a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, LaCapra was SCT's Associate Director from 1996 to 2000, and its Director from 2000 to 2008. LaCapra is a leading European intellectual historian (studies of Durkheim, Sartre, and Flaubert) and an interpreter of contemporary theoretical discourses and of poststructuralist theories for historians. Additionally, he is an advocate of historical perspectives for theorists and has written books on writing history after Auschwitz, providing a critique of the uses of trauma theory and psychoanalysis for historical analysis.