I am W. M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College in Southern California―and someone whose career was changed forever by an NEH Summer Seminar following my first year of tenure-track teaching. For that reason, I’m especially excited to be directing this project again in Dublin, which I first offered in the summer of 2007, and to bring the rich rewards of this program to a new group of scholars.
I began serious study of Joyce as a post-graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1981–82; I returned to the States for graduate training at UCLA, writing a dissertation on Joyce’s relationship to postmodernism. With the help of a 1992 NEH Summer Seminar at Columbia University, directed by Michael Seidel (“Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice: Reading, Interpreting, and Teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses”) I was able to complete revisions of the dissertation, and the book was published in 1996 by U. Wisconsin Press. I have been a regular presenter at the North American and International James Joyce Symposia, and now serve on the editorial boards for the James Joyce Quarterly and Joyce Studies Annual. I have published a further dozen essays or book chapters on Joyce’s work; in 2004, my edition of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in the Barnes & Noble Classics series. In addition to numerous undergraduate and graduate seminars on Joyce and Ulysses, I have taught three times in the James Joyce Summer School hosted by University College Dublin.
Beyond the confines of Joyce scholarship proper, I have been active in the field of modernist studies more broadly. I served as President of the Modernist Studies Association in 2002–03 and have published significantly in modernist studies, serving as editor of the collection Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism and co-editor of Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. I am co-editor of the twentieth-century materials for the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, of the Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, and co-General Editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. I also happily co-edit the Oxford UP book series Modernist Literature & Culture with Paul’s undergraduate Joyce teacher, Mark Wollaeger.
I am Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania. This is the second NEH Summer Seminar I will have co-directed (the first was on Dickens’s Great Expectations and the question of adaptation, on which I collaborated in 2007 with Hilary Schor), and I’m thrilled to be working with Kevin, who is one of my great friends among the many Joyceans I’ve come to know.
If I hadn’t encountered Ulysses—in an undergraduate survey course at Yale taught by our visiting speaker Mark Wollaeger in 1989—I would probably have ended up as an oncologist. But some books have a life-changing appeal, and make life-changing demands on us. After taking two undergrad seminars on Joyce, I embarked on graduate study at Stanford and wrote a dissertation about intertextuality and questions of value in literature and economics. That project evolved into my first book, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003), which concludes with a chapter on Ulysses. Although my published scholarship on Joyce has taken up questions of war, ethics, temporality, and pedagogy, I have remained consistently involved in the complex copyright history and status of his works. From 2004 to 2006 I chaired a panel initiated by the International James Joyce Foundation (on whose board I now serve) to study the permissions criteria and practices of the Joyce Estate; the panel’s work resulted in an FAQ on Joyce and copyright.
Like Kevin, I am active in several areas of study outside of Joyce scholarship: I have commitments to interdisciplinary law and humanities scholarship, trauma studies, and visual culture studies, and I work in both Victorian and modernist studies. I will be President of the Modernist Studies Association in 2012–13. My edited volume Modernism and Copyright was published last year by Oxford UP, and I have co-edited special issues of the journals Representations and Law and Literature. With Jessica Berman I co-edit the Modernist Latitudes book series a Columbia UP. I’m currently working on a book about interwar modernism, total war, and encyclopedic literary form.
Participating formally in the seminar as visiting speaker:
• Mark Wollaeger is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. A member of the Advisory Board for the James Joyce Quarterly, he has edited two collections of essays on Joyce and writes about Ulysses in his book Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. More recently, he has been thinking about Ulysses through the lens of media history.
We are still confirming two additional visitors: watch this space for more news!