Dominick LaCapra 
Bryce & Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies
Office: 340 McGraw Hall
Phone: (607) 255-4178
Fax: (607) 255-1422
E-Mail: dominick.lacapra@cornell.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Research and Teaching Interests
Dominick LaCapra began teaching in the History Department at Cornell in 1969 where he is currently Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a member of the graduate field of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies. He served for ten years as director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and for four years as Associate Director and for eight years as director of the School of Criticism and Theory. In the course of his career, LaCapra's own principal contributions have been to intellectual and cultural history and to critical theory, which he sees as closely related fields of inquiry. His teaching interests range widely in the areas of modern European intellectual and cultural history, historiography, trauma studies, history and literature, and critical theory. His publications include thirteen individually authored books and two edited or co-edited volumes: Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (1972); A Preface to Sartre (1978); “Madame Bovary" on Trial (1982); Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983); History & Criticism (1985); History, Politics, and the Novel (1987); Soundings in Critical Theory (1989); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994); History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998); History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (2000); Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001); History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004); History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009); edited [with S. L. Kaplan]: Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (1982); edited: The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (1991).
Courses
| Fall 2012: | On Leave | |
|---|---|---|
| Spring 2013: | On Leave |
Education
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1970
M.A. Harvard University, 1963
B.A. Cornell University, 1961
Recent Publications and Awards
Books
History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Cornell University Press, 2009)
History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2004)
Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
Articles and Chapters in Books
“Historical and Literary Approaches to the ‘Final Solution’: Saul Friedländer and Jonathan Littell,” History and Theory 50 (February, 2011), 71-97.
“Recent Figurations of Trauma and Violence: Tarrying with Zizek,” Variations 18 (2010), 9-28
“Kant, Benjamin, Pensky, and the Historical Sublime” in The Philosophical Forum XLV (2010), 175-9.
“Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why’,” reprinted in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 191-229.
“Cognitive Capitalism and its Discontents,” in Traces 5 (2009), 333-7. (Reprinted in Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalization, ed. Brett deBary, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.)
“A Response to ‘Holocaust Historiography and Cultural History’ by Dan Stone,” in Dapim, vol. 23 (2009), 47-52.
“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.
"Resisting Apocalypse and Rethinking History," in Keith Jenkins et al. (eds.), Manifestos in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 160-78.
“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.
Preface to Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film, by David Frank and Caroline Picart (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
"Relire l'Histoire de la folie (de Foucault)," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 53 (2006), 7-33.
"Experience and Identity" in Identity Politics Reconsidered," ed. Paula Moya and Michael Hames Garcia (Palgrave, 2005), chap. 14.
"Estudis sobre el trauma: les seves vicissitudes," el contemporani: arts, istòria, societat, July-Dec. 2004, 61-71.
"Tropisms of Intellectual History," Rethinking History (Dec. 2004), 499-529.
“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, The University of Chicago press, 2003), 209-31.
“Liaisons et déliaisons” in Espace/Temps. Special issue on Michel de Certeau histoire/psychooanalyse (2002), 38-54.
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” in Jonathan Monroe (ed.), Writing and Revising the Disciplines (Cornell University Press, 2001), 38-54.
“Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss,” in Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (eds.), Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale University Press, 2000), 178-204.
“Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), 696-727.
Awards
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006).
Award for Aesthetic Theory, Dactyl Foundation (2001).
Institutional Grant from the Mellon Foundation for program enhancement at the Society for the Humanities (2001).
Fellowship, Society for the Humanities at Cornell (2007).
Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory (2009-).