First Carol Zicklin Chair Arrives at the Honors Academy

Lee Quinby

President Christoph M. Kimmich is pleased to introduce Lee Quinby as the inaugural incumbent of the Carol Zicklin Chair in the Brooklyn College Honors Academy.

Lee Quinby is an intellectual historian who specializes in apocalyptic and millennial systems of belief in American culture.  This fall Professor Quinby will be teaching an undergraduate class, Imagining the End of the World, in which she will review the range of scenarios—from in the ancient world to contemporary music, films, and novels—that human beings have envisioned the apocalypse.  "Our sources will prompt us to reflect on how the human imagination itself works, how it accentuates anxiety, and how it also provides reassurance in the face of finality," Quinby says.

She is the author of three books:  Millennial Seduction:  A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture (Cornell University Press, 1999); Anti-Apocalypse:  Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America (Northeastern University Press, 1991).

Quinby received a bachelors degree in English and American literature at the University of North Florida and masters and doctoral degrees in American Studies and English from Purdue University.  She taught at Purdue University and at the University of Athens as senior Fulbright professor in critical theory in 1995.  She held the Gannett Chair in Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology, 1999-2001, and currently holds the Donald R. Harter, '39, Chair for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

The Carol Zicklin Chair is the most distinguished appointment in the Brooklyn College Honors Academy, a federation of honors programs for which the College is nationally known.  Carol Zicklin, '61, is a trustee of the Brooklyn College Foundation and particularly interested in fostering the fortunes of our students.