The News in Brief: Professor Louis Menand to take a year-long sabbatical following the completion of curricular review

After four years at Harvard, English professor Louis Menand—a mastermind behind the general education program that will replace the Core Curriculum—will return to New York City for a sabbatical.

“I am Class of ’07 too, in a way,” Menand wrote in an e-mailed statement last week.

For the next year, The New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author will be a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, where he will work on an intellectual history of the Cold War.

Menand said he postponed his leave for a year in order to complete the general education proposal, as well as to co-teach Humanities 10, “An Introductory Humanities Colloquium,” with Renaissance scholar and fellow English professor Stephen Greenblatt.

When he returns in the fall of 2008, Menand said it is unlikely that he will continue to teach English 177, “Art and Thought of the Cold War,” his popular departmental course that counts for Core credit.

But Menand, who said he is interested to see what the general education curriculum will look like after a year, added that he already has some ideas for new courses he would like to teach.

—JOHANNAH S. CORNBLATT