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Phil Harper is program director for Higher Learning at Mellon, having joined the Foundation after serving as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. He graduated from the University of Michigan and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing and an MA and PhD in English at Cornell. A literary scholar and cultural critic, Mr. Harper has written extensively on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and African American fiction, and on aspects of lived experience in the contemporary United States, including the negotiation of racial, gender, and sexual identities, and various modes of mass-cultural production, circulation, and consumption.