Rampersad with US President Barack Obama at the White House (March 2, 2011)

ARNOLD   RAMPERSAD DATE OF BIRTH: November 13, 1941 PLACE OF BIRTH: Port of Spain, Trinidad EDUCATION: Belmont Boys' Intermediate School, Port of Spain St. Mary's College, Port of Spain Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA CAREER:                                 Arnold Rampersad is a biographer and literary critic. He was a member of the Stanford English Department from 1974 to 1983 before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since that time, he taught at Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton Universities before returning to Stanford in 1998. He was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004 to August 2006. As Senior Associate Dean, he was responsible for the full array of departments in the humanities. His 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. The first volume of his Life Of Langston Hughes was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. From 1991 to 1996, he held a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship. In March 2011, Rampersad was the The Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University, California, USA. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He wrote the following books: The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (1976) The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1(1986), Volume 2 (1988) Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993), with Arthur Ashe Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997) Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) Slavery and the Literary Imagination (co-author) AWARD: 2011 - United States National Humanities Medal Compiled by Ronald C. Emrit