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Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the president of The Teagle Foundation. He is the author of many books, including The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (2018), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity,” and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work “of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.” Melville: His World and Work (2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. He has written numerous essays on American history and literature, a selection of which appeared in Required Reading: Why the American Classics Matter Now (1997), as well as on U.S. higher education, in journals of culture and opinion, especially The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Nation.

Biography

Delbanco was born in White Plains, NY, the son of Jewish parents who fled from Germany to England before emigrating to the U.S. after the Second World War. He attended Fieldston School in Riverdale, NY and received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in English in 1973 from Harvard University, from which he also received his M.A. (1976) and PhD (1980). Delbanco taught at Harvard from 1981-1985 and since 1985 has been on the faculty of Columbia University, where, for twenty years, he held the Julian Clarence Levi chair in the Humanities and, from 2005 to 2015, was the Mendelson Family Director of American Studies.

Delbanco is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1990), the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

He serves as a trustee of the Teagle Foundation and of the Library of America, and is the trustee emeritus of the National Humanities Center.

In 2012, Delbanco was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama "for his writings on higher education and the place classic authors hold in history and contemporary life." In 2006, he received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He was selected as the 2003 New York State Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. In 2001, he was named by Time magazine as "America's Best Social Critic". In 2019, Delbanco won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Mark Lynton History Prize for The War Before the War.

Awards and Honors

An elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was Vice President of PEN American Center from 1996 to 1999. In 2021-22 he served as president of the Society of American Historians.

Three of Delbanco’s books (The Puritan Ordeal, Melville, and The War Before the War) received the annual Lionel Trilling Book Award bestowed by a student committee at Columbia University.

In 2001, he was named by Time Magazine as “America’s Best Social Critic.” In 2006, he received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. In 2012, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for “his writings on higher education and the place classic authors hold in history and contemporary life.” In 2022 he was invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, “the highest honor conferred by the federal government for intellectual achievement in the humanities.”

Books

• William Ellery Channing: An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America (1981)
• The Puritan Ordeal (1989)
• The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (1995)
• Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997)
• The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (1999)
• Melville: His World and Work (2005)
• College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012)
• The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)
• The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (2018)

As editor

• The Puritans in America (1985)
• The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1990)
• The Portable Abraham Lincoln (1992)
• Writing New England (2001)

Notes

1. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
2. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-06-22. Retrieved 2010-03-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Delbanco on John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website
3. "The War Before the War".
4. "Announcing the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards Winners and Finalists". journalism.columbia.edu. March 20, 2019. Retrieved December 2, 2020.

External links

• Delbanco's faculty page at Columbia University
• Delbanco at the National Endowment for the Humanities
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Delbanco at The New York Review of Books
• https://newrepublic.com/authors/andrew-delbanco Delbanco at The New Republic

• American book editors
• American cultural critics
• American essayists
• American male essayists
• American social sciences writers
• Columbia University faculty
• Harvard University alumni
• 1952 births
• Living people
• National Humanities Medal recipients