David L. Lewis has been the Julius Silver University Professor at NYU since 2003. As an expert of the Harlem Renaissance, his focus has been on twentieth-century US social history, but his scholarly interests extend to nineteenth-century Africa and twentieth-century France. The author of seven books (among them The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, and King: A Biography), Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1994 and again in 2001 for his two-volume work on Du Bois. Before joining NYU Lewis taught at the University of Notre Dame, Howard University, University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. He holds graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Columbia University.
During his semester on the Wannsee, Lewis will add twentieth-century German cultural history to his lengthy list of academic inquires, exploring the parallels between Weimar Germany and Harlem’s New Negro Arts Movement. As Lewis points out, “what was at stake in both places was nothing less than the cultural, intellectual, and political conditions indispensable to nurturing a vibrant, participatory democracy.”