Dominick LaCapra is an American-born European historian and the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Career

LaCapra received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He began teaching at the Cornell University Department of History

Cornell University Department of History

|- valign="top" ! style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | College | style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Arts and Sciences |- valign="top" ! style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Department Chair | style="border-top: solid 1px #aaaaaa;" | Barry Strauss...

 in 1969.

LaCapra's work helped to transform intellectual history

Intellectual history

Note: this article concerns the discipline of intellectual history, and not its object, the whole span of human thought since the invention of writing. For clarifications about the latter topic, please consult the writings of the intellectual historians listed here and entries on individual...

 and its relations to cultural history

Cultural history

The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...

 as well as other approaches to the past. He integrated into his own work recent developments in critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

, such as post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...

 and psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

, and indicated their relevance for the rethinking of history. He also demonstrated the use in historical studies of techniques developed in literary studies and aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

, such as close reading and the role of a critical approach to the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production, reception, and circulation.

In addition to its significance in historical research, LaCapra's work has been widely discussed in other humanities and social science disciplines. He has made contributions to Holocaust studies, French studies, musicology, the history of philosophy, the history of social theory and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and comparative literature. At Cornell, he holds a joint appointment in Comparative Literature, and is a member of the graduate fields of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies.

At Cornell, LaCapra has also served for two years as Acting Director and for ten years as Director of the Society for the Humanities. Each year the Society brings to Cornell nine or ten visiting fellows as well as from four to eight Cornell faculty. Moreover, it includes four or five Mellon postdoctoral fellows in its programs. As Director, LaCapra acted as coordinator of events in the humanities and as an important animator at the seminars, conferences, and lectures sponsored or co-sponsored by the Society.

In addition, LaCapra is a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT). He was its associate director from 1996–2000, and from 2000-2008 its director. He was instrumental in the move of SCT from Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

 to Cornell University. SCT was founded in 1976 by a group of leading humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

 scholars (including Meyer H. Abrams, Hazard Adams, Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

, Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey H. Hartman is a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but also has written on a wide range of subjects, and cannot be categorized by a single school or method.-Biography:...

, Murray Krieger

Murray Krieger

Murray Krieger was an American literary critic and theorist. He was a professor at the University of Iowa from 1963, and then the University of California, Irvine.He was born in Newark, New Jersey...

, and Hayden White

Hayden White

Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe...

) in the conviction that theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

, criticism, and research are interrelated and mutually reinforcing activities. From mid-June to the end of July, SCT brings together 80-100 participants—both faculty and advanced graduate students—from around the world to engage in a program of intensive seminars, colloquia, and lectures. With LaCapra's participation, SCT has turned to history and social science as well as continuing to foster innovative thought in literary studies.

Honors

LaCapra has received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching, the Award for Aesthetic Theory from the Dactyl Foundation, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

.

Books

• Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Cornell University Press, 1972; reissued in 1985 by University of Chicago Press; revised edition in 2001 by The Davies Group)
• A Preface to Sartre (Cornell University Press, 1978)
• Madame Bovary on Trial (Cornell University Press, 1982)
• Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Cornell University Press, 1983)
• History & Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1985)
• History, Politics, and the Novel (Cornell University Press, 1987)
• Soundings in Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 1989)
• Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Cornell University Press, 1994)
• History and Memory after Auschwitz (Cornell University Press, 1998)
• History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
• Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
• History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2004)
• History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Cornell University Press, 2009)
• Historia en tránsito. Experiencia, identidad, teoría crítica. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires, 2006.

Edited books

• (With S. L. Kaplan), Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 1982)
• (With S. L. Kaplan), The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Cornell University Press, 1991)
• Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)

Articles

• "Reading Exemplars: Wittgenstein's Vienna and Wittgenstein's Tractatus", Diacritics 9 (1979), 65-82.
• "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts", History and Theory XIX (1980), 245-76.
• "Sartre and the Problem of Biography", The French Review 7 (1982), 22-56.
• "Is Everyone a Mentalité Case? Transference and the 'Culture' Concept", History and Theory XXIII (1984), 296-312.
• "Ideology and Critique in Dickens's Bleak House", Representations 6 (1984), 116-123.
• "Singed Phoenix and Gift of Tongues: William Gaddis's The Recognitions", Diacritics 16 (1986), 33-47.
• "History and Psychoanalysis", Critical Inquiry 13 (1987), 222-51
• "L'effondrement des sphères dans l'Education sentimentale de Flaubert", Annales ESC (Mai-Juin, 1987), 611-29.
• "Hermann Broch as Cultural Historian" in Stephen D. Dowden (ed.), The Legacy of Hermann Broch (Camden House Press, 1988), 42-53.
• "Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre", Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), 95-112.
• "Two Trials: Baudelaire and Flaubert" in Denis Hollier (general ed.), The Harvard History of French Literature (Harvard University Press, 1989), 726-31.
• "Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx", Poetics Today 9 (1988)
• "A Review of a Review", Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 677-87
• "Violence, Justice, and the Force of Law", Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990) 701-14.
• "The Temporality of Rhetoric" in John Bender and David E. Wellbery (eds.), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford University Press, 1991), 118-47.
• Essay-Review of Arno J. Mayer, "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The Final Solution in History", New German Critique 53 (1991), 175-91.
• "Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians' Debate" in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Harvard University Press, 1992), 108-27.
• "The Personal, the Political and the Textual: Paul de Man as Object of Transference", History & Memory 4 (1992), 5-38.
• "Intellectual History and its Ways", The American Historical Review 97 (1992), 425-39.
• "Canons, Texts, and Contexts" in Lloyd Kramer et al. (eds) Learning History in America (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 120-38.
• "European Intellectual history and the Post-traumatic State", an interview in iichiko Intercultural 6 (1994), 108-26.
• "History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon", American Historical Review 100 (June 1995), 799-828.
• "Lanzmann's Shoah: 'Here There Is No Why'", Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), 231-69.
• "The University in Ruins?" Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998), 32-55
• "Memory, Law, and Literature: The Cases of Flaubert and Baudelaire" in Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds.), History, Memory, and the Law (University of Michigan Press, 1999), 95-130.
• "Trauma, Absence, Loss", Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), 696-727
• "Liaisons et déliaisons" in Espace/Temps. Special issue on Michel de Certeau histoire/psychooanalyse (2002), 38-54.
• "Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben" in Writing the Disaster: Essays in Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 262-304.
• "Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim's Voice", in Catastrophe and Memory: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, ed. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner (The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209-31.
• "Experience and Identity" in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Paula Moya and Michael Hames Garcia (Palgrave, 2005), chap. 14.
• "Relire l'Histoire de la folie (de Foucault)", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 53 (2006), 7-33.
• "What Is Essential to the Humanities?" in Do the Humanities Have to be Useful?, ed. G. Peter Lepage, Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, and Mohsen Mostafavi (Cornell University, 2006), 75-85.
• "Resisting Apocalypse and Rethinking History", in Keith Jenkins et al. (eds.), Manifestos in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 160-78.
• "Towards A Critique of Violence," in The Modernist Imagination; New Essays in Intellectual History and Cultural Theory, ed. Warren Breckman et al. (N.Y.: Berghahn, 2009), 210-41.

Other

Rethinking History [5]8 (2004) contains an essay LaCapra was invited by the editors to write ("Tropisms of Intellectual History") that retrospectively reflects on his work. The issue also includes four essays that respond to LaCapra's contribution and provide appraisals of his role in the historical profession (by Ernst van Alphen, Carolyn Dean, Allan Megill, and Michael Roth).

Further reading

Discussions and uses of LaCapra's work may be found in:

• Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
• Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 6 and 7
• François Dosse, La marche de idées: Histoire des intellectuals — histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Editions Découverte, 2003)
• Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2003)
• Josua Hirsch: After Image: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004)
• Martin Jay, "Two Cheers for Paraphrase: The Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian", in Martin Jay, Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47-61
• E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005)
• Lloyd S. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra", in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)
• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity" Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
• Kelly Oliver, Witnessing Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
• Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Representation: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
• John Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience", American Historical Review 92 (1987), 879-907