Harold Foss "Hal" Foster (born August 13, 1955) is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Foster's criticism focuses on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism. In 1983, he edited The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a seminal text in postmodernism. In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant-garde history and commented on contemporary society. In The Return of the Real (1996), he proposed a model of historical recurrence of the avant-garde in which each cycle would improve upon the inevitable failures of previous cycles. He views his roles as critic and historian of art as complementary rather than mutually opposed. Early life and education Foster was born Aug. 13, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a partner in the law firm of Foster, Pepper & Shefelman. He attended Lakeside School in Seattle, where Microsoft founder Bill Gates was a classmate. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1977 after completing a 106-page long senior thesis titled "Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill: Two Poets in a Tradition." He received a Master of Arts in English from Columbia University in 1979. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York in 1990, writing his dissertation on Surrealism under Rosalind Krauss. Career After graduating from Princeton, Foster moved to New York City, where he worked for Artforum from 1977 to 1981. He was then an editor at Art in America until 1987, when he became Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum. In 1982, a friend from Lakeside School founded Bay Press to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster. In the following year Bay Press published The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a collection of essays on postmodernism edited by Foster that became a seminal text of postmodernism. In 1985, Bay Press published Recodings, Foster's first collection of essays. The Anti-Aesthetic and Recordings were, respectively, Bay Press's best and second best selling titles. Foster founded Zone in 1985 and was its editor until 1992. In 1991, Foster left the Whitney to join the faculty of Cornell University's Department