Dominick LaCapra is the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University; he is also the Director of Cornell's School for Criticism and Theory as well as the Society for Humanistic Study. Although his academic formation has been in European history, his areas of research extend to include specialties in critical theory, philosophy, sociology, Jewish studies, and literature. One of the America's most eminent intellectual historians, LaCapra is the author of eleven books, which can be sorted into three categories.

First, there is a series of studies, extending across his career, of leading figures in French intellectual and cultural life, including Durkheim (1972), Sartre (1978), Flaubert (1982), and Tocqueville and Foucault (2000). In the eighties, secondly, LaCapra published four influential books on the methodologies of intellectual history: Rethinking Intellectual History (1983), History and Criticism (1985), History, Politics, and the Novel (1987), and Soundings in Critical Theory (1989). More recently, finally, LaCapra has turned his attention to the Holocaust, devoting three major studies to the topic: Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), and Writing History, Writing Trauma (2000).