Alumnus Sacvan Bercovitch to give talk on June 13

Friday, June 08, 2012

Sacvan Bercovitch, a distinguished and internationally esteemed scholar of American literature and American studies, will visit on Wednesday, June 13, to talk about his work and experience as a graduate student at Claremont Graduate University (CGU).

The talk will take place at 4:15 pm in room 26 of the Burkle Building, 1021 N. Dartmouth Ave. It is free and open to the public.

Bercovitch, who received his PhD from CGU, is the author of many important scholarly books about American literature and culture including The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past President of American Studies Association, and general editor of the 8-volume Cambridge History of American Literature. He has received awards for teaching and scholarship, including the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Languages Association, as well as Lifetime Achievement in three fields: Awards for Early American Scholarship, American Literary Criticism, and American Studies.

He has taught at Princeton, Brandeis, UCSD, Columbia, and Harvard. He served on professional committees and on the boards of journal and university presses, has published over a hundred essays, and has lectured world-wide. His writings have been translated into Chinese, Hungarian, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Born in Montreal, Canada, to immigrant Jewish parents, he has translated Yiddish writers, taught courses in Jewish literature and thought, and has worked on a project in Jewish modernism.