Pericles Lewis

Pericles Lewis, formerly Professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the founding President of Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college in Singapore that is jointly governed by Yale and the National University of Singapore.

Biography

Lewis was born in Canada on September 13, 1968. He is the grandson of Canadian Member of Parliament Andrew Brewin. He attended high school at the University of Toronto Schools and received his bachelor's degree in English Literature from McGill University in 1990, and A.M. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1991. His Ph.D, also in Comparative Literature, is from Stanford in 1997. He travelled extensively in Asia as a young man.

Academic career

He was appointed Assistant Professor at Yale in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature in 1998, promoted to Associate Professor there in 2002, and full Professor in 2007. He was director of Undergraduate Studies for the Yale literature major from 2000 to 2006, and Director of Graduate Studies of their Comparative Literature Department from 2006 to 2010. He was the recipient of the McGill Graduates' Society Award for Student Service (1990), a Whiting Fellowship (1997), the Heyman Prize (2000), a Morse Fellowship (2001), and the Yale Graduate Mentor Award (2004). He is best known for his books The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism and Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. He is also an editor of the third edition of the widely used Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012)

He is the Project Director of the Yale Modernism Lab, an online website for research work in the development of Modernism in literature between 1914-1926.

Yale-NUS

He was appointed President of Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college affiliated with both Yale and the National University of Singapore, by a joint search committee; the appointment was announced on May 30, 2012, effective July 1, 2012. Before appointment, Lewis was a key planner of the new college's curriculum, and supervised the hiring of core faculty. The College's first students matriculated on July 2, 2013. As President, Lewis has advocated the concept of residential liberal arts education as "building a community of learning."

Publications

Books

• The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 9780521199414
• Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN
• The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780521828093.
• Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 9780521661119
  • Review by Alan Munton; The Modern Language Review, Apr., 2003, vol. 98, no. 2, p. 443-444

Articles

• “Proust, Woolf, and modern fiction.” Romanic Review 99 (2008): 77-86.
• “The Reality of the unseen: Shared fictions and religious experience in the ghost stories of Henry James.” Arizona Quarterly 61.2 (Summer 2005): 33-66.
• “Christopher Newman’s haircloth shirt: worldly asceticism, conversion, and auto-machia in The American.” Studies in the Novel 37 (2005): 308-28.
• “Churchgoing in the Modern Novel.” Modernism/Modernity 11 (2004): 667-94.
• “James’s Sick Souls.” Henry James Review 22 (2001): 248-58.
• “‘His Sympathies were in the Right Place’: Heart of Darkness and the discourse of national character.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (1998): 211-44. (Reprinted in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Modern Critical Interpretations, 2008).
• “The ‘True’ Homer: myth and enlightenment in Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno.” New Vico Studies 10 (1992): 24-35.

Books Edited

Norton Anthology of World Literature New York: Norton, 2012. Ed. Martin Puchner et al.

External links

• Lewis's Webspace at Yale