Donald Weber

Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth Professor of English

Specialization: American literature and culture

Donald Weber is the author of Haunted in the World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to "The Goldbergs" (2005, Indiana University Press). The book explores the ways modern Jewish writers and makers of popular culture responded to the challenge of adjusting to America, voicing their imaginative encounter in accents of resistance and celebration, irony and longing.

In 2003, Weber was the recipient of a fellowship to the Bellagio Center for his project "The Anxiety of Belonging: Multiculturalism and Identity Politics in U.S. and UK Literacy and Popular Culture." The project compares how the idea of belonging and the constructions of ethnic identity are explored in the literary and popular cultures of the U.S. and UK. Fellowships to the Bellagio Center, a historic estate on the shores of Lake Como run by the Rockefeller Foundation, are highly prestigious and go to established scholars judged by their peers to be doing cutting-edge work.

Weber's recent essays have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), Entertaining America (2003), Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (2003), Jewish Social Studies (1999), The Massachusetts Review (1997), Talking Back: Representations of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture (1998), and The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (1996). He teaches a first-year seminar Multicultural Families, American Literature I and III, Ethnic Expression in America, The Political Imagination in Contemporary South Africa, and Henry James on Film.

While on leave during the Spring 2006 semester, Weber will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of London's Institute of English Studies.

News LInks:

"Weber Reviews Buruma," Chicago Tribune, September 10, 2006

"Faculty Honored for Teaching and Scholarship," Office of Communications, May 1, 2006

"A Whale of a Book About Herman Melville," Chicago Tribune, November 6, 2005

"Haunted July," Milestone, College Street Journal, May 20, 2005

"Weber Looks at Current Jewish-American Writers," Office of Communications, October 22, 2004

"Mount Holyoke Trustees Approve 13 Faculty Chairs," Office of Communications, March 12, 2004