Date: May 27, 2011

Hofstra University Mourns the Loss of Dr. Dana Brand, Professor of English

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY … The Hofstra community is deeply saddened by the passing of Professor of English Dana Brand on Wednesday, May 25. Dr. Brand was a former chair of the English Department and taught all genres and periods of American literature, with a main focus on fiction written between 1850-1950. He had been on the Hofstra faculty since 1989.

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Dr. Brand was the author of The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Cambridge, 1991) and numerous articles on topics in English, American, and French literature, philosophy, and film. He was also a personal essayist and the author of 2007’s Mets Fan, a collection of essays about his experiences as a baseball fan. He wrote a second book about baseball fandom in 2009 titled The Last Days of Shea. Professor Brand was particularly active in Hofstra’s Honors College, where he taught “Culture and Expression,” the interdisciplinary course that is the core of the HUHC curriculum. He said in a 2007 interview with Hofstra Magazine, “The students are so exciting, receptive and involved. In this course I get to introduce them to literary works written hundreds of years ago, and I love to see how they find ways to connect these works to their lives. … If I wasn’t in regular contact with these bright, exciting young people, I would have a much less interesting and much less hopeful view of the world.”

Dr. Brand and Dr. Richard Puerzer, chair of the Department of Engineering, were in the midst of working with the Hofstra Cultural Center on a 2012 conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the New York Mets. He also maintained a blog about the Mets at http://danabrand.com/blog/.

Dr. Brand is survived by his wife, Sheila Fisher, and his daughter Sonia. Funeral services are private, but a public memorial service is being planned for June 4 at the Meeting House in Newtown, CT. A campus memorial will be planned for the fall semester.