Arnold Rampersad

Arnold Rampersad is an English profsor of specialising in the literary criticism of black American literature, most famously for poetry. He is of Indo-Trinidadian origin.

He is currently Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, assumed the post of Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities in January 2004. As Senior Associate Dean, he is responsible for the full array of departments in the humanities, including Art & Art History, Asian Languages, Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, French and Italian, German Studies, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages and Literature, and Spanish and Portuguese.*

Professor Rampersad was a member of the Stanford English Department from 1974 to 1983, before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since then he has taught there and at Columbia and Princeton before returning to Stanford in 1998.

His books include the following:

• The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (Harvard, 1976) • The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford, 2 vols., 1986, 1988) • Days of Grace: A Memoir (Knopf, 1993), co-authored with Arthur Ashe • Jackie Robinson: A Biography (Knopf, 1997)

In addition, he has edited several volumes including the following: • Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, the Library of America edition (2 vols.) of works by Richard Wright, including revised individual editions of Native Son and Black Boy • Slavery and the Literary Imagination (as co-author) • Race and American Culture (co-editor with Shelley Fisher Fishkin) - of the book series published by Oxford University Press

His teaching covers such areas as nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African-American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance. From 1991 to 1996, he held a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He is currently at work on a biography of Ralph Ellison (1914 - 1994).