The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, now among the most prominent in North America, were established in honor of Richard Ellmann (1918-1987), who served Emory University as the first Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 to 1987. For more than forty years, his writing set the highest standards of critical inquiry and humanistic scholarship. The biographer of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, Professor Ellmann enjoyed eminent domain among the interpreters of W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and other modern authors. His public lectures were unparalleled in their appeal to a worldwide audience of readers, for Professor Ellmann always spoke in a language that invited the reader to share his or her personal engagement with serious literature.

The Richard Ellmann Lecturers, 1998-2008:

1988 Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing
1990 Denis Donoghue, Being Modern Together
1992 Anthony Burgess (resigned; deceased)
1994 Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style
1996 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Art and Politics of Wole Soyinka
1999 A.S. Byatt, Fathers, Forefathers, Ancestors: The Surprising
Renaissance of British Historical Novel
2001 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel
2004 Salman Rushdie, The Other Great Tradition
2006 Mario Vargas Llosa, Three Masters: Cervantes, Borges, and
Ortega y Gasset
2008 Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

Click here for photos from the 2008 lectures.

Professor Ron Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, directed the Ellmann Lectures for twenty years. After the 2008 lectures he retired from the position, and Professor Joseph Skibell, Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing, has accepted the role.

This biennial series is published for Emory University by Harvard University Press, which plans to publish Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist in 2009. Mario Vargas Llosa’s Ellmann Lectures were published under the title Wellsprings earlier this year.