Eric J. Sundquist teaches courses in American literature and culture, with special interests in African American literature, Jewish American literature, and the literature of the Holocaust.  Before returning to Johns Hopkins, where he received his Ph.D. in 1978, he taught at Berkeley, Vanderbilt, UCLA, and Northwestern, where he was also Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Sundquist’s books include King’s Dream (2009);Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America(2005), which received the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award; To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1992), which received the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa and the James Russell Lowell Award from the Modern Language Association; The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African American Literature(1993); Faulkner: The House Divided (1985); and Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1979), which received the Gustave Arlt Award from the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States.

He has edited essay collections devoted to Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and contributed to the Cambridge History of American Literature (reprinted as Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865).  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2007 was named a recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.