The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences calls its Class Day “Convocation.” And brings really cool people to it. This spring, graduates can look forward to the wise words of Eric Foner, beloved Dewitt Clinton Professor of History and CC ’63, GSAS ’69. One ponders if he ever crossed paths with Paul Auster, CC ’69, GSAS ’70 and acclaimed first chronicler of the heights writer, who will share in sending the GSAS ’12 graduates out into the world.

Full announcement available after the jump.

Paul Auster and Eric Foner to Speak at GSAS Convocation Ceremonies

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University is pleased to announce that Paul Auster and Eric Foner will speak at this year’s Master’s and Ph.D. Convocation ceremonies, respectively.

Paul Auster, ’69CC, M.A. ’70, English and Comparative Literature, is one of the country’s most distinguished writers. Mr. Auster began his career as a poet and translator and then expanded into prose with such works as the memoir The Invention of Solitude, The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Art of Hunger, and, most recently, Invisible, Sunset Park, and the forthcoming Winter Journal. He has received numerous literary awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, given to a writer of “progressive, original, and experimental tendencies.” The New York Trilogy, his postmodern update of the private-eye genre, was awarded the Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère, and his novelLeviathan received the Prix Médicis Étranger.

Mr. Auster also wrote and directed the films Lulu on the Bridge and The Inner Life of Martin Frost, co-wrote and -directed the film Blue in the Face, and wrote the screenplay for Smoke, for which he earned an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay. In 2006 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, in recognition of “the transformation in literature that he has wrought by blending the best of American and European traditions, for the innovation he has brought to narrative style in the cinema, and for integrating a number of devices used by the cinema into literature.” He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN American Center.

Eric Foner, ’63CC, Ph.D. ’69, History, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. One of the country’s most prominent historians, Professor Foner is the recipient of the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians.

Professor Foner specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America, with a particular concentration on intersections of intellectual, political, and social history and the history of American race relations. His published books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War;Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877; The Story of American Freedom; Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World; and, most recently, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Professor Foner has received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University. He was named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities in 1995, and in 2006 he received and the Kidger Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship from the New England History Teachers Association. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.

Foner via columbia.edu, Auster via Wikimedia Commons