Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He received his Dr. phil. at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1975.

Chair, Afro-American Studies, 1984-1987, 1988-1990; Chair, Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, 1997-2002; Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English and American Literature and Language, 1997-2001; Chair, Ethnic Studies, 2001-2004, 2009-2010; Director of Graduate Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, 2005-2007, 2009-2010; Voting faculty member in Comparative Literature

Past Teaching Experience: Università degli Studi di Venezia, Columbia University, John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. Visiting professor at Oxford, München, Berlin, Bern, La Sapienza Rome, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Nanjing Normal University, and New York University Abu Dhabi

Honors: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, 1981; Constance Rourke Prize 1990 for best essay in American Quarterly; Walter Channing Cabot Fellow, Harvard University, for 1997/98; NEH Fellowship, 1999-2000; Honorary doctorates from University of Regensburg and West University of Timisoara; Corresponding Member of the Bavarian American Academy, 2000-; Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001-; Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2005

For more information, see:

scholar.harvard.edu/wsollors

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

1. BOOKS:

2. BOOKS EDITED:

  • The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 294pp.
  • The Return of Thematic Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993 (Harvard English Studies, 18). 324pp
  • (Co-edited w. Maria Diedrich) The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994 (Harvard English Studies, 19).
  • Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. London: Macmillan and New York: New York University Press, 1996. 502pp.
  • Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 410pp.
  • (Co-edited with Marc Shell) The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York University Press, 2000.  750pp.
  • An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 676pp.
  • Alexandre Dumas: Georges. New York: Modern Library, 2007 (with notes and afterword).
  • (Co-edited with Greil Marcus) A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.  1128pp. Russian translation Новая литературная история Америки Москва: Издательство «Весь Мир», 2021.
  • (Co-edited with Glenda R. Carpio) African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges. Special issue of journal Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4 (2010). ISBN  978-3-8253-5896-9.
  • (Co-edited with Julia Faisst and Alan Rosen) David P. Boder, Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011.
  • The Norton Critical Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
  • Mark Twain. Pudd’nhead Wilson. The John Harvard Library. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015.
  • Jeffrey B. Ferguson. Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance. (With introduction). New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021.

3. Recent ARTICLES:

  • “Arrivals and Departures.” Harbors, Flows and Migrations: The U.S.A. in/and the World, eds. Vincenzo Bavaro, Gianna Fusco, Serena Fusco and Donatella Izzo (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 13-31.
  • “American phantasmagoria.” American Phantasmagoria: Modes of Representation in US Culture (in honor of Alide Cagidemetrio), eds. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Simone Francescato (Venezia: Supernova Publishing, 2017), pp. 205-222.
  • “The Family of Man: Looking at the Photographs Now and Remembering a Visit in the 1950s.” The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age, eds. Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz and Shamoon Zamir (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), pp. 95-115.
  • “‘A World Carefully Faked for Our Coming’: German-American Encounters in 1940s Bavaria (and Beyond).” In: German- American Encounters in Bavaria and Beyond, 1945-2015, eds. Birgit Bauridl, Ingrid Gessner, and Udo J. Hebel (Frankfurt, Basel, New York: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 37-52.
  • “Seeing Images, Thinking of Words: Visual Art as Translation,” for Thomas Nolden, ed. In the Face of Adversity: Translating Difference and Dissent (London: University College London Press, 2022), pp. 179-192.
  • “Letters from Persepolis.” European Review of Books 6 (2024): 100-118.

4.  DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS:

5.  Work in Progress:

A short book on four residents of early 17th-century Venice has been completed in manuscript: Ambassador and Poet Sir Henry Wotton, Chaplain and Hebraist William Bedell, Rabbi Leon Modena, and Servite Friar Paolo Sarpi.

Jointly with Alide Cagidemetrio, I am at work on a book about visitors to ancient sites, titled Face to Face with Antiquity.