Vassar College Department of English

Faculty

H. Daniel Peck, John Guy Vassar Professor of English, is the former director of Vassar’s Environmental Studies Program and its American Culture Program.  He is the author of Thoreau’s Morning Work and The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction, both published by Yale Univ. Press. Professor Peck's other publications include two Penguin Classics editions of Thoreau’s works, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cooper’s Deerslayer, and the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer. A contributor to the Cambridge Literary History of the United States and the Heath Anthology of American Literature, he is a past chairman of the Modern Language Association's Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature.  Prof. Peck has received two NEH Fellowships and an ACLS Fellowship, and has directed two NEH Summer Institutes for College and University Faculty.  His current research, which finds frequent expression in his teaching, links American literature and landscape painting.  Recent examples of his work on painters are an article on Asher B. Durand, in American Literary History (Oxford), and one on Georgia O’Keeffe in American Art (Smithsonian).