* Specializing in American literature, Bérubé also teaches undergraduate courses in “American and African-American literature,” as well as graduate courses in “cultural studies.”

* Bérubé is the author of several books, including Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998); What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (2006); and The Left at War (2009).

* In 2010 Bérubé said the following about President Barack Obama: “I never expected much from Obama on the economic front. I expected neoliberalism, more or less, and I got more…. But I am genuinely surprised, and therefore genuinely disappointed, by Obama’s record on civil liberties. I knew he would escalate in Afghanistan, but I believed him when he said he would close Guantanamo.”

* Bérubé says that contemporary white racists typically use “code words” to disparage African Americans, such as when they condemn black-on-black crime by saying “black lives are cheap, most notably to blacks.”

* Bérubé son James was born in 1991 with Down’s Syndrome. James’ birth has led Bérubé to push for the recognition of “disability law as a form of civil rights law whose domain is potentially universal.” Bérubé argues that “disability law can be understood in terms of ‘capability rights’ that equip U.S. citizens to make the most of their other substantive rights as citizens,” and he believes that “disability legislation can form the basis for a pragmatic universalism that insists on the inclusion of all citizens, to the fullest extent possible, in deliberations over the content and the purpose of democracy.”