PhD 1966 University of Southern California
AM 1963 University of Southern California
BS 1960 University of California, Los Angeles

Barry Sanders holds a PhD in Medieval Literature with an emphasis on literature and language. He taught for over thirty years at the Claremont Colleges in the departments of literature and the History of Ideas. He was the first person to hold the Peter S. and Gloria Gold Chair at Pitzer College, of the Claremont Colleges. The author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles for various magazines, Sanders was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award.

In 2005 Sanders won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to investigate the idea of the Commons in Greece and he has recently been featured on WNYC’s RadioLab.

Sanders is interested in the shift from oral to literate cultures, and the concomitant changes of that shift, ranging from memory to language, and religion to retribution. He helped start and edited Grove: Poetry in Translation, serves as a contributing editor of North American Review, and frequently contributes to Cabinet. His book, The Green Zone: the Environmental Costs of Militarism, was selected as one of the top-ten censored stories of 2009. He is currently writing a book on the death of metaphor.