Sacvan Bercovitch

Sacvan Bercovitch, an acclaimed scholar of American literature and culture, died on December 9, 2014. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Sir George Williams College in Montreal, Canada, in 1961, and received both his master’s (1963) and doctoral (1965) degrees from Claremont College of California. Over the course of a distinguished career, Sacvan published more than one hundred essays, lectured worldwide, and was recognized with lifetime achievement awards from the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association in three fields: early American scholarship, American literary criticism, and American studies. He was twice awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, traveling to Russia and the Czech Republic. He taught at several universities, including Princeton; Brandeis; the University of California, San Diego; Columbia; and Harvard. Most recently, he was named the Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature at Harvard. He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a past president of the American Studies Association, and general editor of the eight-volume Cambridge History of American Literature. He received awards for teaching and scholarship, including the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, and served on numerous professional committees and on the boards of many journals and university presses.