The Hurst Professorship
An endowed chair, the Hurst Visiting Professorship brings to campus annually four or more distinguished writers. In addition to presenting readings and lectures, these visitors are particularly accessible to students in the Writing Program through one-on-one and group meetings. Recent Hurst Professors have included poets Frank Bidart, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Lyn Hejinian, Heather McHugh, Arthur Sze and Jay Wright and fiction writers Amy Bloom, Tony Earley, Amy Hempel, Michael Martone, Hilary Mantel, Sigrid Nunez and Joy Williams.
The Hurst Professorship is made possible by a bequest of the novelist Fannie Hurst, an alumna of Washington University. The Hurst Professors are in residence either for a one or two-week period, during which they visit classes, give public lectures and readings, and are accessible to students interested in their field, or for the whole semester, in which case they also offer an upper division course (for example, Leonard Barkan's "Intertextuality and the Anatomy of Art in the Renaissance," Helen Vendler's "Problems in the Interpretation of Poetry," Joseph McElroy's "Modern Fiction").
Fall 2007 Visiting Hurst Professors and Writers
Peter Orner is the author of the collection Esther Stories, which was awarded the Rome Prize from The Academy of Arts and Letters and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award; and, most recently, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller which was awarded The Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and Best American Stories. Currently a writer-in-residence at Bard College, Orner received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.
Alan Lightman is Adjunct Professor of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist and educator. He is author of nearly a dozen books and has published a number of essays, fables, short stories and book reviews. Origins won the 1990 Association of American Publishers award. Einstein’s Dreams, chosen as the common text for this year's Freshmen Reading Program at Washington University, was runner-up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Winship Award. In 1996 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and that same year won the 1996 American Institute of Physics Andrew Gemant Award for linking science to the humanities. Lightman will read from his fiction as Visiting Hurst Professor, and will lecture on Einstein's Dreams as part of the Assembly Series fall lineup.
Eric Santner , a leading theorist of the modern subject and the ethics of cultural practice within the contexts of contemporary forms of authority, is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor of Modern Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago and the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies. He is the author of On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life; My Own Private Germany; and Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. With Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard, he is the author of The Neighbor, which is, among other things, a major reconsideration of the ethics of Lacan and Levinas. Slavoj Zizek has called On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life "a new classic. . . on a par with Heidegger and Wittgenstein." Judith Butler describes it as "one of the finest works I have read in recent years. . . unparalleled and original."
Susan Wheeler is the author of four collections of poetry, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, Smokes, Source Codes, and Ledger; and a novel, Record Palace. Wheeler’s poems have been included in eight editions of Best American Poetry, and her writing has been published in The Paris Review, New American Writing, and The New Yorker. The Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Norma Farber First Book Awards are among her accolades. Currently on the faculty of Princeton University and the New School’s graduate program, Wheeler is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Priscilla Wald is professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University. Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries. Her current work focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. She is especially interested in analyzing how the language, narratives and images in the popular media register and promote a particular understanding of the science that is steeped in (often misleading) cultural biases and assumptions. In her research, her teaching and her professional activities, she is committed to promoting conversations among scholars from science, medicine, law and cultural studies in order to facilitate a richer understanding of these issues. Wald is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form published by Duke Univeristy Press in ’95. She is completing two book projects, one on contagion, culture and the evolution of the outbreak narrative, and the other work on the public understanding of the genome sciences.
Spring 2008 Visiting Hurst Professors and Writers
Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University where he teaches American literature and cultural studies. His most recent books include: What' s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias ” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, ‘06) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, ‘06). Bérubé is a profolic essayist and can be found in a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and the minnesota revie, as well as more popular venues such as Harper', the New Yorker, Dissent, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Nation, and the Boston Globe. Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.
Janet Lyon Janet Lyon is associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State University. Lyon’s research interests include: modernism and modernity; gender and sexuality; aesthetic and sociological collectivity; literary and critical theory; disability studies; and Roma culture. Her awards include: The College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award (‘07), The University of Illinois Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (‘99), Fellow, University of Illinois Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics (‘94-’95), University of Illinois Vice Chancellor's Teaching Scholar (’92-‘93). Her first book, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern was published by Cornell University Press in ’99. She is currently working on a book about literary salons: The Perfect Hostess: Salons in Modernity.
Tony Grafton Tony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton. Grafton’s interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. His honors and awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Behrman Prize for Achievement in the Humanities among many others. His most recent publications include: Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (‘02); Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (‘02); Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (‘01). Grafton is known for the tremendous range and depth of his scholarship as well as the ability to present this knowledge in a most accessible and entertaining form.
Michael Palmer most recent collections are, The Promises of Glass, Codes Appearing (Poems 1979-1988), and Company of Moths, all from New Directions. Among his awards, Palmer has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Award, two National Endwoment for the Arts grants in poetry, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. His selected essays and talks, Active Boundaries, is scheduled for publication in spring of 2008. He has taught at many universities in the United States and in Europe, and his work has been translated into more that twenty-five languages.
Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowhip in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.