Biography
Deborah H. Holdstein is Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing. For seven years, Holdstein served as Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Columbia, and before that, she was Chair of the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.
At Columbia, Holdstein teaches courses in literature and film at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and her scholarly work spans several areas, including rhetoric and composition and film studies. Holdstein’s first book, On Composition and Computers (MLA, 1987), reflects her extensive, scholarly interest in technologies and the humanities. Her recent publications include The Oxford Reader (Oxford University Press, published with a 2023 copyright, with co-author Danielle Aquiline), Who Says? The Writer’s Research (Oxford University Press, with co-author Aquiline, third edition published in 2020), and Food: A Reader for Writers (also OUP and with Aquiline, 2015). Holdstein has published numerous scholarly articles and other books.
Holdstein’s scholarly volume, Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition, will be published in early 2023 by the Modern Language Association. She has also served a five-year term as editor of the premier journal in composition and rhetoric, College Composition and Communication. Her current projects include an article on the Hebraic sources of Jesuit rhetoric.
Holdstein earned the MA and PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the BA at Northwestern University.
Degrees
B.A., English Northwestern University 1973
M.A., Comparative Literature University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 1975
Ph.D., Comparative Literature University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 1978