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For media inquiries or to contact a faculty expert, please contact Media Relations:
Phone: 212.854.2037
Email: mediarelations@barnard.edu

Sun Min
Director of Media Relations

Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations

james g. basker

Professor of English and
Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History

James G. Basker, Professor of English and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History, joined the faculty of Barnard College in 1987 after teaching at Harvard University for seven years.

Professor Basker is a multi-disciplinary specialist in the 18th century. His interests span the fields of history and literature and include the Black Atlantic and the history of slavery and abolition; the life and works of Johnson; the history of print culture; and women writers. Professor Basker is affiliated with Barnard's Human Rights Studies Program.

A former Rhodes Scholar and recipient of NEH grants, he has been awarded fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, Yale University, and Cambridge University.

He is currently working on a book about Johnson, Boswell, and the problem of slavery and preparing a scholarly edition of Tobias Smollett's novel Roderick Random. He is also co-editor, with David Blight and David Eltis, of the forthcoming Yale Atlas of Slavery.

Professor Basker is on the Editorial Board of The Age of Johnson, and the Board of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars. He is an elected fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Society of American Historians.

In addition to his teaching duties at Barnard, Professor Basker serves as President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He is also the founder and president of Oxbridge Academic Programs, which has established programs for middle and high school students in Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Montpellier, and Barcelona.

Selected Publications

Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820, editor (New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute, 2005; paperback edition 2007)

Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 1660-1810, editor (Yale University Press, 2002; paperback edition 2005).

The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 1756-1763. A modern edition, editor (London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers , 2002)

Samuel Johnson in the Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: The Johnsonians, 1999)

Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, co-editor with Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J. (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist (University of Delaware Press, 1988). Winner of a 1989 Choice Award

CONTACT:

James Basker
Professor of English, Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History
Barnard College

212.531.3732

jgbasker@aol.com

Please cc mediarelations@barnard.edu

EDUCATION:

D.Phil., Oxford University

M.A., Cambridge University

A.B., Harvard University