Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is a National Book Critics Award finalist whose most recent book is the national best-seller, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation—"history at its most delicious,” said The New York Times Book Review on its front cover and named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker, among other publications. Her other books include The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (a "landmark study") as well as Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, both named best books of the year by The New York Times, and the award-winning White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ambassador Award (for Hawthorne: A Life), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, as well as a National Endowment Public Scholars Award, she was recently a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Review of Books and, previously, was Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College and executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Her biography of Fiorello La Guardia will be published as part of the Yale University Series of Jewish Lives next year.
News
Adjunct Professor Brenda Wineapple's latest book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, explores the infamous 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial." Published by Random House in August, the book examines the trial of John T. Scopes, a Tennessee school teacher prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution, through the lens of America's ongoing struggles with religious fundamentalism and the teaching of science.
Many Columbia alumni and faculty were among those recognized by NPR’s prestigious end of year list.
The School of the Arts is well represented on this years’ prestigious New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, which includes alumni and faculty members working across all genres, and ranges from veterans of the craft to a debut novelist.
Professor Brenda Wineapple's essay, The First President Ever to Be Impeached, is the cover story in the spring issue of The American Scholar. It is adapted from her forthcoming book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, to be published by Random House in May.