The 2000 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture

Geoffrey Hartman was born in Germany in 1929, spent the war years in England, and came to this country in 1945. He holds degrees from Queens College of the City University of New York (B.A., Comparative Literature, 1949) and Yale University (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, 1953). He served in the U.S. Army from 1953-55. Professor Hartman has held faculty positions at the University of Iowa, Cornell University and Yale University. He has also been a visiting professor or scholar-in-residence at many institutions of higher education and research in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University, Hartman was a guest scholar at The George Washington University at the time of the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. At Yale, he is also project director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, of which he was a co-founder.

Professor Hartman has published in the area of literary thought, including its relevance to Judaic and Holocaust Studies. His books include A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections 1958-1998 (1999), The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (1991), The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (editor, 1986), Midrash and Literature (edited with Sanford Budick, 1986), Easy Pieces (1985), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980), Beyond Formalism (1970), Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787- 1814 (1964), Andre Malraux (1960), and The Unmediated Vision (1954).

Hartman was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for Wordsworth’s Poetry in 1965; was named “Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres” by the French Ministry of Culture in 1997; received the 1997 Prize for Contribution to Jewish Scholarship from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture; and was awarded the Rend Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association for The Fateful Question of Culture in 1998. He received an honorary degree from Queens College, CUNY, in 1990.

Hartman has delivered the Christian Gauss Seminar Lectures at Princeton University (1968), the Clark Lectures at Trinity College Cambridge (1983), the Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario (1983), the Glicksman Lectures at the City College of New York (1986), the Rend Wellek Lectures, University of California, Irvine (1992), and the Tanner Lectures at the University of Utah (1999). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Argentina (1989), Ireland (1987), and Uruguay (1985).

Hartman held ACLS Fellowships in 1963-64 and 1979-80; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships in 1969-70 and 1986-87; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1975-76. Professor Hartman serves on the editorial board of Studies in Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, the Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature, History and Memory, and the Jerusalem Review. He has also been a Special Advisor to the Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (1982-87). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.