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, 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 Ellmann always spoke in a language that invited the reader to share his or her personal engagement with serious literature.

The Richard Ellmann Lecturers

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 the 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"
2010 Margaret Atwood, "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination"

Check out a YouTube video that describes the excitement and history behind the Richard Ellmann Lecture series.

The Ellmann Lectures are directed by Joseph Skibell, associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. Skibell accepted the directorship in 2008 when Ron Schuchard, Goodrich C. White professor of English, retired from the position.

Skibell is the author of three novels: A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic. He has received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship, among numerous other awards. His work includes plays, stories, essays, and a libretto for an opera based on A Blessing on the Moon.

Ellmann Lecturers are chosen by an international selection committee, which this year consisted of Michael Kramer, professor of English, Bar-Ilan University, Esther Schor, professor of English, Princeton University; and Sharon Green, associate professor of Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, University of Toronto.

Links to Ellmann books:
Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style
A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories
David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel
Mario Vargas Llosa, Wellsprings