The 2005-06 Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series

The 2005-06 Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series Sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature College of Humanities and Fine Arts University of Northern Iowa

Karen McElmurray, Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College and State University "Finding the Self, Finding the World: Fiction, Memoir, and Meaning" September 26, 2005, Commons Ballroom, 7 p.m.	Karen McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey (University of Georgia Press, 2004), the winner of the 2003 AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls Surrendered Child “so much more than a memoir. McElmurray has composed a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” Professor McElmurray is also the author of the novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (Hill Street Press, 1999), which received the 2001 Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received awards including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

	Ed Folsom serves as the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-directory of the on-line Walt Whitman Archive, and editor of the Whitman Series at The University of Iowa Press. He is also the author or editor of numerous books and essays on Whitman and other American writers, including Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, Whitman East and West, and Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. His new book, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (co-authored with Kenneth Price) was published this year by Blackwell.	Ed Folsom, Carver Professor of English, University of Iowa “What We Are Still Learning about the First Edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass 150 Years Later” November 9, 2005, Lang Hall Auditorium, 2:30 p.m.

Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics, North Carolina State University “Language Differences and the Public Interest” February 23, 2006, Commons Ballroom, 7 p.m.	Walt Wolfram directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University and is a former president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s, authoring or co-authoring 18 books and more than 250 articles. Professor Wolfram remains vitally concerned with the application of sociolinguistic information to social and education problems.

	Stephen Greenblatt is the author of numerous influential studies of literature and literary theory including Hamlet in Purgatory, Practicing New Historicism, and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. His most recent book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, received the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award for Biography and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Professor Greenblatt also in the general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and the co-founder of the journal, Representations.	Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities “Shakespearean Beauty Marks” April 11, 2006, Maucker Union Ballroom A, 7 p.m.

Funding for this series is provided by the Meryl Norton Hearst Chair in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, with additional support from the Department of English Language and Literature, the Honors Program, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Iowa. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Dr. Samuel Gladden at samuel.gladden@uni.edu.