VINCENT PECORA
Director, Humanities Consortium;
Director, Center for Modern & Contemporary Studies;
Professor of English & Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles

Vincent Pecora earned his B.A. at Brown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. He has taught at UCLA since 1985. He currently serves as the Director of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies, a research center devoted to 19th- and 20th-century society and culture, as well as the Director of the Humanities Consortium, which administers an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship program. His work addresses modern literature, intellectual history, and literary theory. His books include: Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), an anthology of historical documents focused on the various meanings of "national identity," from the Reformation to the present; Households of the Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), a study of the household as fact and metaphor in anthropology, literature, and literary theory in the modern period; and Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), an analysis of the rise of modernism in the context of the rationalized society. Recent work includes the essays "Rethinking Modernity and Religion," forthcoming in Studies in the Humanities; "Benjamin, Kracauer, and Redemptive History," forthcoming in Genre; and "The Culture of Surveillance," Qualitative Sociology, 25: 3 (2002), 345-58. At present, he is working on a book about the question of religion in modern intellectual life.