Author and essayist Andrew Delbanco is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he also serves as director of undergraduate studies in English. He has written extensively on American history and culture for publications such as The New Republic, New York Times, New Yorker, Commonwealand Partisan Review.
Delbanco is the author of The Puritan Ideal,which tells the dramatic tale of the 17th-century newcomers to America as they rebuilt their lives, and the editor of The Portable Abraham Lincoln. He most recently authored The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil,in which he examines the ways in which the very notion of evil seems to be incompatible with modern American life and how the ideas of transgression and the accountable self are fast receding. Delbanco cites his driving motive behind this book to be the conviction that if evil, with all its insidious complexity, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion. He also looks at the past strategies in which American leaders like Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Jefferson and Lincoln, Thoreau and Whitman and more modern writers such as Rachel Carson and Susan Sontag have recognized and done battle with evil in their works.
Delbanco received his bachelor's degree at Harvard University in 1973, and his doctorate in 1980. He began teaching at Columbia University shortly after and was promoted to a full professor in 1987.
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