Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC, the only independent institute for advanced study in the world dedicated to the humanities. Under his leadership, the Center has sponsored a major initiative bringing humanists and scientists together to assess the impact of recent empirical work on our understanding of the human, an initiative that resulted in a special issue of Daedalus in 2009. He is the author of nine books, including The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (1987); One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (1996); Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999); and The Humanities and the Dream of America (forthcoming, 2011). His longstanding interests include the role of ethics in literary study, the work of Joseph Conrad, and the place of language in intellectual history. In recent years, he has become a prominent historian of and advocate for the humanities. He has received fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.