Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, literary critic and scholar Louis Menand will leave his current post at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) to join Harvard’s faculty next spring, top English department officials said—with a prestigious named chair and a Core class likely to come soon after.

Enthusiastically admired by his academic colleagues, Menand, who was unavailable for comment, is a frequent contributor to such popular forums as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His book The Metaphysical Club, published in the summer of 2001, earned glowing praise from accomplished scholars and casual readers alike for its portrait of a loose group of American intellectuals after the Civil War—including such luminaries-to-be as Henry and William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The book, which digressed from the story of the so-called club’s brief existence into grand philosophical considerations and lively historical analysis, managed to stay on bestseller lists for weeks and win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history.

“We’ve had a couple of excellent ones in the past year or two,” Bernbaum Professor of Literature Leo Damrosch said of distinguished English department recruits. “But this is a great one for us.”

The Border Ranger

Damrosch cited medievalist James Simpson, a senior faculty member at Cambridge University until his recruitment by Harvard’s English department this spring, as another such eminent hire. But while Simpson is highly respected within his field, students and the wider public outside his specialized academic domain are unlikely to have heard of his work.

Menand, on the contrary, is something of an intellectual celebrity.

The Metaphysical Club was hardly his first taste of fame—a fame which extends to Harvard’s students as well as its top English faculty. Among hundreds of publications and press mentions in the last five years, Menand published “The Thin Envelope” in the pages of the New Yorker this April.

The essay-review, which cast a skeptical eye at the game of college admissions, became the talk of Harvard’s dining halls and open lists.

In Damrosch’s words, Menand is “a highly visible and public individual.” But English Department Chair Lawrence Buell said he is not at all concerned that Menand’s prominence will distract from his scholarly work or his teaching at Harvard—indeed, he says it will be an immense boon.

“He’s a person who speaks to thinking people both inside the academy and well beyond its walls,” Buell said, linking this switch-hitting to a Harvard tradition. “Harvard is a place where many faculty, not all but many, find themselves speaking to wider publics because of the centrality of the place. Menand already does that.”

And Elisa New, the English professor who led the search committee which chose Menand, hailed his “erudition” along with “a great deal of dash” in an e-mail.

Marc Dolan, an English professor who has worked with Menand at CUNY, phrased his high opinion of Menand’s scholarly worth more bluntly.

“He appears to have read everything,” Dolan said with a chuckle. “That’s very useful.”

Menand is also well-known for another kind of boundary-straddling: the energetic interdisciplinarity of his work.