email: vcrapanzano@earthlink.net

phone: (212) 817-8169

Vincent Crapanzano, Distinguished Professor (Graduate Center) teaches both Comparative Literature and Anthropology. He received an A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Columbia. He has done field research with the Navajo in Arizona, with the spirit-possessed in Morocco, with whites in South Africa, with Fundamentalist Christians and legal conservatives in the United States, and now with the Harki in France.

He is the author of numerous books and articles including, The Fifth World of Forster Bennett: A Portrait of a Navaho (Viking, 1972; 2002); The Hamadsha: An Essay in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (U California P, 1973); Tuhami: A Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago, 1980); Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (Random House, 1986); Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Harvard, 1992); Serving the Word: From the Pulpit to the Bench (New Press, 2000); and Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. His articles have appeared in many anthologies as well as in such journals as The American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethos, Psyche, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Yale Review of Criticism, Mana, and Critical Inquiry.

Aside from reviews in academic journals, he has reviewed for the Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement and published articles in The New Yorker, Harpers and other magazines. Many of his articles and books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, and Hebrew. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Paris, the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Brasilia and the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro and has lectured throughout the United States and abroad. Among other awards, he has been a recipient of a Sherman Fairchild fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, a Poynter Fellowship at Yale, resident fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin, and a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, NSF, NIMH, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the CNRS in France, and the Commssion nationale de Cinema, also in France.

He delivered the Jansen Lectures in Frankfurt am Main in 1998 on the theme of the anthropology and poetics of the imagination. He is presently completing research for a book on the Harkis and their children - those Algerians who sided with the French during the Algerian War of Independence. Among his interests are theories of interpretation, literary anthropology, life histories and autobiographies, phenomenology and existentialism, psychiatric anthropology, the anthropology of religion, language and literature, and ritual, symbolism, and mythology. He has recently taught courses in Contemporary Theories of Interpretation, Modern Literary Criticism, the Philosophical Recit, the Anthropology and Poetics of the Imagination, Life History and Autobiography, and Phenomenology and Existentialism.