Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities fellows program

Noted Scholar Helen Vendler to Present Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture

Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, will present this year’s lecture on Thursday, January 18th at 4:10 p.m. (Flynn Auditorium, Vanderbilt University Law School). Her lecture title is “The Yeatsian Sequence: ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and ‘Blood and the Moon.’” Professor Vendler’s research interests include English and American lyric poetry, and she is the author and editor of over twenty books. Currently, Vendler has two works in progress: “ ‘Our Secret Discipline’: Yeats’s Styles and Forms,” and “Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, Ammons.” In 2004, she delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture—the federal government’s most distinguished award for intellectual achievement in the humanities—and she is the recipient of twenty-three honorary degrees from universities throughout North America and Europe.

The Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Series was established in 1994 through the endowment of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Nash, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. George D. Renfro, all of Asheville, North Carolina. The lecture honors Harry C. Howard Jr. (B.A., 1951) and allows the Warren Center to bring an outstanding scholar to Vanderbilt annually to deliver a lecture on a significant topic in the humanities.

The Allure of Spices in the Middle Ages
2005

Presented by Paul Freedman
Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University

All the King's Men and Primary Colors: The Relationship Between Political Fiction and Political Factors in Election Year 2004
2004

Presented by Joe Klein
Journalist and author

American History, with Fire in its Eye
2003

Presented by Stephen J. Pyne
Professor of Biology and Society at Arizona State University

A Life in Moods: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Illness
2002

Presented by Kay Redfield Jamison
Professor of Psychiatry Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Honorary Professor of English, University of St. Andrews (Scotland)

In Search of the Middle East
2001

Presented by L. Carl Brown
Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs Emeritus Princeton University

Biography and African-American Lives
2000

Presented by Arnold Rampersad
Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

Buying Influence: Advertising and the Political Process
1999

Presented by Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Professor of Communication and Dean, The Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center

Liberalism in Difficulty
1998

Presented by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy, Harvard University

Dilemmas of the Therapeutic Society:
Dispatches from the New Age and Other Places of Higher Education
1997

Presented by Michael F. Brown
James N. Lambert 1939 Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, Williams College

Arrangements of Self-Love: Boswell and Rousseau
1996

Presented by Patricia Meyer Spacks
Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

The Poet and the Father: Robert Penn Warren and Thomas Jefferson
1995

Presented by Lewis P. Simpson
Boyd Professor and William A. Read Professor of English Literature, emeritus, Louisiana State University

Sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

For more information, contact the Center's executive director, Mona C. Frederick.

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Photo credits: Gerald Holly and Vanderbilt University Design & Publishing