On Friday the 15th of September in the festive setting of the
Riggs Memorial Library members of the Lannan Family and of the Lannan
Foundation joined with faculty members from the Georgetown English
Department in celebrating an extraordinary gift, a $3 million endowment
from the Lannan Foundation to establish the Lannan Foundation Chair
within the English Department. The Lannan Chair will be the anchor of a
new Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, additionally funded
at $100,000 for three years, with the promise of repeated renewals of
this funding.
The Lannan Chair will be a revolving appointment, to be
held by distinguished international writers for terms of one to three
years. Its full title is the Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics –
poetics understood in the largest sense of the term, encompassing the
manifold genres of the world republic of literature, and embracing
creative practices engaged with issues of cultural freedom and matters
of public consequence. Its emphasis will be international in scope and
will enable the English Department to bring to Georgetown writers and
thinkers from around the globe who will allow Georgetown to become even
more than in the past a publicly significant forum for the nexus of
contemporary poetics and social practice. The Lannan Professor will
teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, offer and/or
sponsor readings, and contribute directly to the programming under the
auspices of the Lannan Center -- in particular the already extant Lannan
Poetry Series and the annual Lannan Symposium -- and, it is hoped,
broaden their international reach.
The Lannan Center will oversee the numerous Lannan programs
currently in the Department’s portfolio, namely: 1) the annual Lannan
Poetry Series; 2) the annual Lannan Symposium; 3) the Lannan Fellows
and seminar series; 4) the Lannan Graduate Fellowship, which supports a
graduate student who assists with Lannan programming; 5) the Visiting
Lannan Writer-in-Residence; 6) the Distinguished Reader series; and 7)
outreach programs, such as Poetry in the Schools and various programs at
the Duke Ellington School for the Arts.
Patrick Lannan, the head of the Foundation, is a 1960
graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences; his daughter, Sharron
Lannan Korybut, received an undergraduate degree from the English
Department in 1990 and a Georgetown English MA in 1991. They work
closely with Georgetown in the development of these Lannan programs,
assisted by the staff of the Lanna Foundation, people like Jaune Evans
and Jo Chapman who have become creative and generous colleagues working
on these Georgetown based projects.
The Lannan Foundation is
one of the largest arts/culture oriented foundations in the United
States. The range and the initiative of its work can be sampled on the
Foundation’s website at
www.lannan.org , which outlines the Foundation’s literary,
artistic, and indigenous communities programs, and their emphasis on
literary/cultural freedom and the relationship of the arts to social
justice.
The recent developments leading to this endowed chair and to the
enhancement and the growth of various other programs are the fruit of
many years -- more than a decade -- of dedicated work by many people,
above all David Gewanter and Mark McMorris, but many others: Ward
Tietz, George O'Brien, Lucy Maddox, Gay Cima, Andrew Rubin, Louise
Bernard, and others who have been part of Lannan programs in recent
years. To all these, but especially David and Mark, the English
Department owes a very singular debt of thanks.
On April 21 Professor Mark McMorris announced that the first holder of
the new Lannan Chair in Poetics, for 2007-2008, will be Ammiel Alcalay
of the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College, in New York City. Dr.
Alacaly was most recently a visitor to Georgetown for the Lannan
Symposium 2006, The World Republic of Literature. A prolific
scholar, translator, editor, and poet, he has published After Jews
and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993) and From the Warring
Factions (2002), and edited Keys to the Garden: New Israeli
Writing (1996). His translations from Spanish, Arabic, Bosnian, and
Hebrew have circulated widely. His important translation from the
Bosnian of Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues appeared in
English in 2003. Alacaly's research interests include Sephardic
literature, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literature and culture,
Balkan literatures and history, American poetry poetics, and theories of
translation. He is currently Deputy Executive Director of the Doctoral
Program in English at the Graduate Center.
For a more detailed announcement of the new Lannan Chair of Poetics ,
please visit
http://www.georgetown.edu (News and Events), or
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=24624.
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