Born: 1961.

Education: Columbia University, BA, 1982; University of Virginia, PhD, 1987.

Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He taught at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and he was the founding director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities from 1997 to 2001. From 2010 to 2017, he was the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State. He was the 2012 president of the Modern Language Association and served as vice president from 2010 to 2011. He served two terms on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors from 2005 to 2011, and three terms on the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2009 to 2018.

Publications

Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992), Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994), Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996), The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998), What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (2006), Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (2006), The Left at War (2009), The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (with Jennifer Ruth, 2015), The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (2016), Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (2016).

His important articles include “Avant-Gardes and De-Author-Izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism,” Callaloo (1989); “Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism,” Social Text (1993); “The Blessed of the Earth,” Social Text (1997); “The Yale Strike Dossier,” Social Text (Winter, 1996); “Against Subjectivity,” PMLA (1996); “Autobiography as Performative Utterance,” American Quarterly (2000); “Introduction: Worldly English,” Modern Fiction Studies (2002); “American Studies without Exceptions,” PMLA (2003); “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA (2005); “Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” Metaphilosophy (2009); and “How We Got Here,” PMLA (2013).