Edmund W. Gordon Lecture

11th Annual Edmund W. Gordon Lecturer:

Dr. Hortense Spillers

Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor and Distinguished Research Professor, Emerita

Vanderbilt University

Since receiving her Ph.D. from Brandeis, Dr. Spillers has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory, and Cornell Universities. She also served as a visiting professor in the Program in Literature (Duke University) and the John F. Kennedy Center for North American Studies (Free University in Berlin). She has taught courses in American and African-American literature, Faulkner, and feminist theory.

A recipient of numerous honors and awards, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, Dr. Spillers has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences. While at Haverford, she chaired the English Department. At Cornell, she joined the Norton project and served as editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. At Vanderbilt, she founded The A-Line Journal, an independent online magazine devoted to the examination of national and world events through a theoretical lens.

She is the author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003) and editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985, with Marjorie Pryse) and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991).

Dr. Spillers serves on several editorial boards, among them, the Editorial Collective of Boundary 2. She is a former member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association. She co-founded, with Tamura Lomax, The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to feminist issues and critique. Some of her recent essays have appeared in The New Centennial Review, Das Argument, and Boundary 2.

She lives in Nashville, travels extensively, and lectures widely. She delivered the 2010 Sidney Warhaft Distinguished Memorial lecture at the University of Manitoba, and the 2014 DuBois Lecture at Harvard University.

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The Annual Edmund W. Gordon Lecture is one of three distinguished lectures sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Teachers College, Columbia University and it is designed to bring together renowned experts from the field of education and the humanities to share their scholarship and engage in meaningful discussions with the Teachers College community. The lecture pays lasting tribute to the incomparable legacy of achievement and service to humanity of Professor Edmund W. Gordon, Founder and Director Emeritus of the Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (formerly IUME) — a legacy that will inspire scholars and educators for generations to come.

Sponsored by the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study.

A reception will follow the lecture. RSVP required.

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To request disability-related accommodations, contact OASID at [email protected], or 212-678-3689, (646) 755-3144 video phone, as soon as possible.

Host or Publisher IUME Teachers College, Columbia University