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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. He is the inaugural holder of the Alexander Hamilton Chair of American Studies, established at Columbia in 2015.

While serving as a trustee of the National Humanities Center (1996-2006), he chaired the Education Committee, which was instrumental in developing the Center’s work with high school teachers. Upon his appointment in 2018 to the presidency of the Teagle Foundation, he said that his aim was "to continue and deepen Teagle's support of people and programs committed to bringing the gift of liberal education to all students -- not just the privileged few.”

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.”

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. "The War Before the War". Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
2. "Announcing the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards Winners and Finalists | Columbia Journalism School". journalism.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
3. "Teagle Foundation Names Delbanco Next President | Inside Higher Ed". www.insidehighered.com. Retrieved 2022-07-13.

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