Pericles Lewis


Pericles Lewis, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of comparative literature at Yale University, was the founding President of Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college in Singapore that is jointly governed by Yale and the National University of Singapore. He currently serves as Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Strategy of Yale University, with the responsibility of "sustain and augment Yale's international presence as a leader in liberal arts education and a world-class research institution."

Biography

Lewis was born in Canada on September 13, 1968. He is the grandson of Canadian Member of Parliament Andrew Brewin. He attended high school at the University of Toronto Schools and received his bachelor's degree in English Literature from McGill University in 1990. He received the degree of A.M. in Comparative Literature in 1991 and his Ph.D, also in Comparative Literature, in 1997 from Stanford University. He travelled extensively in Asia as a young man.

Academic career

He was appointed Assistant Professor at Yale in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature in 1998, promoted to Associate Professor there in 2002, and full Professor in 2007. He was director of Undergraduate Studies for the Yale literature major from 2000 to 2006, and Director of Graduate Studies of Yale's Comparative Literature Department from 2006 to 2010. He was the recipient of the McGill Graduates' Society Award for Student Service, a Whiting Fellowship, the Heyman Prize, a Morse Fellowship, and the Yale Graduate Mentor Award.
He is best known for his books Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism and Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. He is also an editor of the third and fourth editions of the widely used Norton Anthology of World Literature
He was the Project Director of the Yale Modernism Lab, an online website for research work in the development of Modernism in literature.

Yale-NUS

He was appointed President of Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college affiliated with both Yale and the National University of Singapore, by a joint search committee; the appointment was announced on May 30, 2012, effective July 1, 2012. Before appointment, Lewis was a key planner of the new college's curriculum, and supervised the hiring of core faculty. The College's first students matriculated on July 2, 2013 and graduated on May 29, 2017.
As President, Lewis advocated the concept of residential liberal arts education as "building a community of learning."

Publications

Books

Norton Anthology of World Literature New York: Norton, 2012. Ed. Martin Puchner et al.