Arnold Rampersad


Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
Rampersad is currently Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004 to August 2006.

Background and career

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Rampersad moved to the US in 1965.
He graduated from Bowling Green State University with a bachelor's degree and master's degree in English. In 1973 he earned a Ph.D from Harvard University, his dissertation being subsequently published as the intellectual biography The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. DuBois.
He was a member of the Stanford University English Department from 1974 to 1983, before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since then he taught there and at Columbia and Princeton, before returning to Stanford in 1998.
Rampersad's teaching covers such areas as 19th- and 20th-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African-American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance.

Honours

From 1991 to 1996, Rampersad held a MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellowship. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2007, his biography of Ralph Ellison, on which he had worked for eight years, was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and in 2012 was the recipient of the BIO Award from Biographers International Organization. Also in 2012, he won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Personal life

Rampersad is the half-brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100.

Books

In addition, Rampersad has edited several volumes, including the following: