Edward Said - Career

Career

In 1963, Edward Saïd joined Columbia University, as a member of the faculties of the department of English and of the department of Comparative Literature, where he taught and worked until 2003. In 1974, he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard College; in the 1975–76 biennium he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, at Stanford University; in 1977, he was the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and subsequently was the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities; and, in 1979, he was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

As a peripatetic academic, he also worked as a visiting professor at Yale University, and lectured at more than one hundred universities. In 1992, he was promoted to University Professor, the highest-ranking academic job at Columbia University. Editorially, Edward Saïd served as president of the Modern Language Association; as editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; on the executive board of International PEN; in the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in the Royal Society of Literature; in the Council of Foreign Relations; and he was a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1993, he presented the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures, a six-lecture series titled Representation of the Intellectual, wherein he examined the role of the public intellectual in contemporary society, which the BBC later published in 2011. As a university professor, Saïd visited few places to give lectures, but, in the 1990s, he lectured at the Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario; some 30,000 students attended his lectures. The works of Edward Saïd, about literature, politics, the Middle East, music, and culture, have been translated to twenty-six languages, published by magazines and newspapers such as The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily newspaper al-Hayat.