Ruth and Harold Newman Dean Erec R. Koch, PhD

Erec R. Koch joined Hunter College in fall 2011 as the Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. He earned an AB magna cum laude from Harvard College and a PhD in French literature from Yale University. From 1988-2007, he served on the Faculty of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Tulane University, which included two terms as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the men’s liberal arts division, Tulane College, and one as Chair of the Department of French and Italian. Dean Koch served as Professor of French and Head of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, from 2007 to 2011. He has received numerous grants and fellowships from agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. A specialist in seventeenth-century French literature and culture, he has published on Pascal and Jansenism, the history and theory of rhetoric, French Classical theatre, the French moralists, philosophy and the history of ideas, theories of the passions, and the representation of the body. He is the author or editor of three books, and his most recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Littératures classiques, and Seventeenth-Century French Studies.