Rate My Professor Donald Pease

Donald E. Pease is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, and Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College, where he joined the faculty in 1973, advancing from assistant to full professor. He holds a B.A. (1968) and M.A. (1969) from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D. (1973) with honors from the University of Chicago. Pease previously occupied the Avalon Foundation Chair in the Humanities (1996-2011) and serves as Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute, directing its annual summer program for over 24 years to critique and advance the field of American Studies. His career includes visiting appointments such as Drue Heinz Lecturer at Oxford University (2000-2001), Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo (2008), and positions on advisory boards for American Studies programs at institutions including Uppsala University and Freie Universität Berlin.

Pease's scholarship spans 19th-century American literature, modern American drama, national narratives, imperial state exceptionalisms, biopolitics, and comparative and transnational American Studies, evidenced in his interpretive biography Theodor SEUSS Geisel (Oxford University Press, 2010) and works like New American Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), nominated for the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize; Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), winner of the Mark Ingraham Prize; Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, co-edited with Amy Kaplan (Duke University Press, 1992); National Identities and Postnational Narratives (Duke University Press, 1994); and Futures of American Studies, co-edited with Robyn Wiegman (Duke University Press, 2002). Recent publications include “Ahab’s Electromagnetic Constitution” in Ahab Unbound (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and “The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Counter-Transference of Power” (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2021). Among his honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989-1990), multiple NEH fellowships and directorships, Dartmouth Distinguished Teaching Award (1981), and the American Studies Association’s Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime service (2012). Pease has edited volumes such as New Essays on the Rise of Silas Lapham (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and co-edited the Re-Mapping the Transnational series, shaping transnational approaches in American literary studies.