Interdisciplinary Superstar Menand Will Join English Department

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, literary critic and scholar Louis Menand will leave his current post at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) to join Harvard’s faculty next spring, top English department officials said—with a prestigious named chair and a Core class likely to come soon after.

Enthusiastically admired by his academic colleagues, Menand, who was unavailable for comment, is a frequent contributor to such popular forums as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His book The Metaphysical Club, published in the summer of 2001, earned glowing praise from accomplished scholars and casual readers alike for its portrait of a loose group of American intellectuals after the Civil War—including such luminaries-to-be as Henry and William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The book, which digressed from the story of the so-called club’s brief existence into grand philosophical considerations and lively historical analysis, managed to stay on bestseller lists for weeks and win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history.

“We’ve had a couple of excellent ones in the past year or two,” Bernbaum Professor of Literature Leo Damrosch said of distinguished English department recruits. “But this is a great one for us.”

The Border Ranger

Damrosch cited medievalist James Simpson, a senior faculty member at Cambridge University until his recruitment by Harvard’s English department this spring, as another such eminent hire. But while Simpson is highly respected within his field, students and the wider public outside his specialized academic domain are unlikely to have heard of his work.

Menand, on the contrary, is something of an intellectual celebrity.

The Metaphysical Club was hardly his first taste of fame—a fame which extends to Harvard’s students as well as its top English faculty. Among hundreds of publications and press mentions in the last five years, Menand published “The Thin Envelope” in the pages of the New Yorker this April.

The essay-review, which cast a skeptical eye at the game of college admissions, became the talk of Harvard’s dining halls and open lists.

In Damrosch’s words, Menand is “a highly visible and public individual.” But English Department Chair Lawrence Buell said he is not at all concerned that Menand’s prominence will distract from his scholarly work or his teaching at Harvard—indeed, he says it will be an immense boon.

“He’s a person who speaks to thinking people both inside the academy and well beyond its walls,” Buell said, linking this switch-hitting to a Harvard tradition. “Harvard is a place where many faculty, not all but many, find themselves speaking to wider publics because of the centrality of the place. Menand already does that.”

And Elisa New, the English professor who led the search committee which chose Menand, hailed his “erudition” along with “a great deal of dash” in an e-mail.

Marc Dolan, an English professor who has worked with Menand at CUNY, phrased his high opinion of Menand’s scholarly worth more bluntly.

“He appears to have read everything,” Dolan said with a chuckle. “That’s very useful.”

Menand is also well-known for another kind of boundary-straddling: the energetic interdisciplinarity of his work.

“He’s a renowned scholar who’s recognized not just in the field of American literature studies and modern literature more generally, but across disciplinary borderlines, among historians and philosophers as well,” Buell said.

He said this made Menand a perfect fit for the department’s vision of its future.

“Professor Menand’s unusual breadth of interest goes with that perception of the way that the modern university is and ought to be flowing: not crystallizing into self-contained compartments or enclaves, but engaging in all different forms of outreach,” said Buell.

Professor-Hunting

Dolan said Menand has been “very much part of the life” at CUNY—but added that in the Graduate Center’s decentralized setup, where most of the faculty is drawn from other colleges in the CUNY system, there was something missing for Menand.

“At the Graduate Center you’re spending half of your time somewhere else, so it has less centrality than something where the undergraduate and graduate programs are connected,” Dolan said.

Menand’s new home in Cambridge will provide such an intermingled academic milieu.

“He has not been part of a complete university situation,” said Damrosch. “He’s eager to do that.”

But when New’s search committee, convened last spring, came up with Menand’s name, it had to contend with competitors from not one but two other colleges seeking to poach him.

According to Buell, two New York schools—New School University and Columbia University—wanted Menand for themselves if he left CUNY, but Columbia’s was the main offer Menand considered before deciding on Harvard.

Columbia English Chair Jonathan Arac wrote in an e-mail that he thought it was a close call between the two Ivies.

“I think he would happily have come here, but he made another choice that he preferred,” he said.

Arac said Columbia’s talks with Menand began “in late fall” of 2002.

Meanwhile, Buell said, Harvard’s search committee had whittled down their “list of several dozen possibilities” to replace retiring Cabot Professor of American Literature Sacvan Bercovitch to a single pair—Menand and one other, whom Buell would not name—who came to Cambridge for talks and interviews this past winter. Menand, he said, was a smashing success.

“If the department wants to move ahead [with a prospective hire], they have to get a lot of testimony from the outside world—in this case Americanists, nationally and internationally—about the appointment,” Buell said. “All of that was strong in favor.”

Many factors combined to make Menand a no-brainer for the department.

Damrosch said his focus in modernism and American literature was something that made him a very attractive candidate, calling him “a major figure who’s really centered there.”

“This is something we’ve been trying to do for quite a while, and I think we really found the right person,” he said.

Buell called Menand’s hiring “one sign of the resolution to commit more of our resources to modern literature, culture and studies,” saying those areas are “the center of gravity of Prof. Menand’s work.”

And New especially noted Menand’s intellectual ties to the University.

“We in the Harvard English department cherish a special affection for an Americanist who has made Harvard and Harvardians so much his subject,” she said, mentioning his work on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Class of 1861, William James, Class of 1864, T.S. Eliot ’12 and former University President James B. Conant ’14 among others.

Buell also stressed Menand’s ability in the classroom.

He “has been proven to reach out very effectively to all student constituencies,” said Buell. “He’s keen to teach and he’s had great success teaching, from freshmen to a graduate school level,” he said.

Dolan echoed this praise, speaking of the high demand which students always had for Menand’s time at CUNY.

“His courses would inevitably fill up within several hours,” he said.

Under the weight of such rave reviews, Buell said, top FAS administrators hurried Menand through the approval process, with the final go-ahead coming in mid-May of this year.

“We’re delighted that it happened really much more quickly—the process from start to finish—than is average for Harvard’s senior faculty recruitment,” he said. “It’s not unknown for it to take several years from the first nibble stage to when the person actually arrives.”

Buell said Menand’s hiring had been unrelated to the substantial numbers of English faculty who will be on leave next year, calling that timing “a happy coincidence to say the least.”

Joining the Club

By all accounts, it seems Menand will be in his element here in Cambridge, which the Metaphysical Club he scrutinized called home.

“He seems born to give a lecture course, which you don’t have much opportunity to do at CUNY,” said Dolan.

Menand will have ample opportunity to scratch that academic itch at Harvard: in addition to a graduate seminar on “Art and Thought of the Cold War,” Menand is to teach an undergraduate lecture course on the James siblings next spring—and Buell said he had expressed a desire to teach “something in the Core as quickly as possible.”

According to Buell, the process for approving new courses in the Core Curriculum means Menand will probably have to wait until the 2004-2005 academic year to teach there.

He will also find a warm welcome in the English department. Over and over again, Menand’s colleagues-to-be said they were looking forward to working with him.

“We are happy to welcome him to our metaphysical (and physical) club,” New said.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.