ACLS News

Robert Alter Named 2013 Haskins Prize Lecturer

ACLS is pleased to anounce that Robert Alter, Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, will deliver the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture at the 2013 ACLS Annual Meeting. The meeting will be held on May 9-11 in Baltimore, Maryland. Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Haskins Prize Lecture series, entitled “A Life of Learning,” celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series and made available on the ACLS website (see Haskins Prize Lectures).  

Professor Alter has taught at UC Berkeley since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. 

Professor Alter has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His 22 published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages. Among his publications over the past 20 years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The World of Biblical Literature (1992) and Hebrew and Modernity (1994). Professor Alter’s two most recent books are Imagined Cities (2005) and Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007). His new book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

In 2009, Professor Alter received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.

The 2012 Haskins Prize Lecture will be delivered by Joyce Appleby,  professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read more.