James Engell

Since 1978 James Engell has taught at Harvard, chairing the Department of English from 2004 to 2010. He earlier chaired Comparative Literature and the degree program in History & Literature, and served on the Committee on the Study of Religion. He serves as a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment and began his studies leaning toward science. He has taught environmental seminars at the National Humanities Center and for a consortium of nine North American and Asian Universities.

In 2008 Yale University Press published Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, which he conceived and for which he acted as a co-editor. His other books include, with Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), which won in 2007 the Association of American Colleges & Universities Ness Book Award for best book on liberal education.

The recipient of four faculty-wide teaching and advising awards, Engell teaches courses in General Education (on rhetoric and on the Enlightenment), romantic poetry, eighteenth-century studies, and environmental issues. He served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and belongs to the Cambridge Scientific Club. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.