Cloud Lecturer

In 2004 Sara Cloud made a bequest to support a lecture series in the Department of English to honor the achievements and perpetuate the memory of Dr. Jess Cloud, accomplished poet, author, scholar, and former development officer and teacher in the College's Honors Program. Selected speakers are of national renown and may be outstanding scholars in the areas of Mr. Cloud’s achievements and scholarship: poetry, the Renaissance, and sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and twentieth-century literature.

Recent Cloud lecturers include:

• 2009. Harvard Professor of English Leah Price will give a talk entitled "From the History of the Book to the 'History of the Book.'" Professor Price will be interrogating the overlap between recent scholarship on the history of the book and the long tradition of fiction that raises questions about the act of reading.  While scholars often discuss the common interests of human agents, Leah Price explores the nature of circulation in both of these scholarly trajectories. As analytical bibliographers have long emphasized, books accrue meaning not  just through their manufacture, but through their subsequent uses:  bought, sold, exchanged, transported, defaced, mended, sorted, catalogued, ignored, collected, neglected, discarded, recycled.  Professor Price will examine book circulation in a variety of narratives, including fictional autobiographies and such histories as the "Adventures of the Bible,"  in which a thing traces its travels among a series of richer and poorer owners.

• 2008. University of Michigan Professor Marjorie Levinson is the author of The Romantic Fragment Poem: Critique of a Form (UNC Press, 1986), Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge, 1986), Keats’s Life of Allegory: Origins of a Style (Blackwell, 1988), and Rethinking Historicism (editor and contributor, Blackwell, 1989).

• 2008. Emory University Professor of English Craig Womack is the author of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism and the novel Drowning in Fire. He teaches courses on Native American Literature, Muscogee literature, and gay and lesbian literature. His lecture will form part of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature's meeting in Williamsburg.

• 2007. Arnold Rampersad is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and the Cognizant Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University. He is also one of the country's leading experts on African American literature and culture. In addition to editing the work of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, he has published biographies of Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, and Jackie Robinson. His book Ralph Ellison: A Biography is forthcoming from Knopf in April, 2007.

• 2006. Marjorie Perloff, the first Cloud Lecturer, has been for 30 years a leading critic and scholar in the field of 20th-century literature. She has taught at Stanford and the University of Southern California and was the president of the Modern Language Association in 2006.