Andrew Delbanco

Professor Delbanco has taught at Columbia since 1985. His most recent book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul (2018), was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf prize for “books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity,” the Lionel Trilling Award, and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, for a work “of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression.” 

His other books include Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005), College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012; 2d edition 2023), The Puritan Ordeal (Harvard University Press, 1989), The Death of Satan: How Americans have Lost the Sense of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), Required Reading: Why the American Classics Matter Now (FSG, 1997), and The Real American Dream (Harvard, 1999).  

Professor Delbanco earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. In 2001 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named “America’s Best Social Critic” by Time Magazine.  In 2006 he was honored with the Great Teacher Award by the Society of Columbia Graduates. He has served as president of the Society of American Historians and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. A trustee of Bard College, he holds honorary degrees from Ursinus College, Occidental College, Marlboro College, and Gettysburg College. He is president of the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal education at colleges and universities around the country.

In 2012, Mr. Delbanco was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. In 2022 he delivered the Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”