Michael J. Colacurcio

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One of the UCLA English department's most proficient and revered instructors, Michael Colacurcio has been described by many as a “true lecturer” whose passion, astuteness and sheer presence has inspired and influenced many lives. Prior to coming to UCLA in 1984, Colacurcio taught at Cornell for more than 20 years, winning that university's coveted Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.

A former UCLA student says that Colacurcio has “more passion, fervor, human and genuine excitement than any other teacher I have had, at either the undergraduate or graduate level.”

A renowned specialist in the work of the 19th-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Colacurcio has taught undergraduate and graduate students in the notably difficult literature of colonial and 19th-century America. He earned his A.B. in philosophy in 1958 and his master's degree in English the following year at Xavier University. Colacurcio received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois in 1963 and specializes in American literary and intellectual history from 1600-1900.

Colacurcio's teachings deals with the Puritans. His good-faith efforts to inspire in his students a morally responsible respect for a culture that can feel geographically and theoretically opposite to their own have met with spectacular success. Only one course evaluated in 16 years of teaching at UCLA has earned him less than a 7.30 as an instructor, and the professor habitually garners mid-eights to perfect nines for advanced upper division seminars and graduate courses. One UCLA alumna testifies that “receiving an ‘A' from ... (Colacurcio) was less about learning the material – the ending place for most courses – than about doing something with it.”

Colacurcio has directed more dissertations than any other Department of English professor in the pre-1900 fields. Numerous students of his have gone on to teach and hold chairs at such institutions as Chicago, Colgate, Santa Barbara, Ohio State, Riverside, Bowling Green, Barnard, SUNY Buffalo, Penn State, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Texas and Princeton.