He 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-August 2006. As Senior Associate Dean, he was responsible for the full array of departments in the humanities, including Art & Art History, Asian Languages, Classics, Comparative Literature, Drama, French and Italian, German Studies, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Slavic Languages and Literature, and Spanish and Portuguese.*

Professor Rampersad was a member of the Stanford 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.

His teaching covers such areas as nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African-American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance. From 1991 to 1996, he 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, he published a biography of Ralph Ellison (1914 - 1994).

He is also the half brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100.

Books

• The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (Harvard, 1976)
• The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford, 2 vols., 1986, 1988)
• Days of Grace: A Memoir (Knopf, 1993), co-authored with Arthur Ashe
• Jackie Robinson: A Biography (Knopf, 1997)
• Ralph Ellison (Knopf, 2007)

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

• Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
• the Library of America edition (2 vols.) of works by Richard Wright, including revised individual editions of Native Son and Black Boy
• Slavery and the Literary Imagination (as co-author)
• Race and American Culture (co-editor with Shelley Fisher Fishkin) - of the book series published by Oxford University Press

External links

• Contacting Arnold Rampersad by email+