Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote The Elements of Typographic Style, a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in June 2013.
Sanskrit literature refers to texts composed in Sanskrit language since the 2nd-millennium BCE. Many of the prominent texts are associated with Indian religions, i.e., Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and were composed in ancient India. However, others were composed central, East or Southeast Asia and the canon includes works covering secular sciences and the arts. Early works of Sanskrit literature were transmitted through an oral tradition for centuries before they were written down in manuscript form.
The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts of plot, character and genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity and a strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago School is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.
Francis George Steiner, FBA is a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath", saying that he is either "often credited with recasting the role of the critic", or a "pretentious namedropper" whose "range comes at the price of inaccuracy" and "complacency".
Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Visual Arts, and the College. He previously held the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professorship in Humanities and the George M. Pullman Professorship, and served as the chair of the University's English Language and Literature Department from 2006-2008. After a brief term as the Deputy Dean for Academic and Research Initiatives in the Division of the Humanities, Brown was recruited to be the new Deputy Provost for the Arts in 2014. As Deputy Provost, Brown oversees the programming and future of UChicago Arts, serves on the Arts Steering Committee, and chairs the UChicago Art Institutions subcommittee. He also serves on a number of other committees across campus - including the Executive Committee of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture - and is the principal investigator for the Object Cultures Project at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He has co-edited the University of Chicago's peer-reviewed literary journal, Critical Inquiry, since 1993.
James M. Redfield is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has made numerous contributions to current scholarship on Homer and Herodotus, probably the most notable of which is his book, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, an anthropological reading of the Iliad with the stated goal of analyzing Hector's role in the work.
Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek Tragedy.
Richard and Florence Atwater co-authored the book Mr. Popper's Penguins, which won the 1939 Newbery Honor Award.
David M. Halperin is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, material culture and visual culture. He is the cofounder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and author of several books including Before Pastoral (1983) and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990).
Gopi Chand Narang is an Indian theorist, literary critic and scholar who writes in Urdu and English. His Urdu literary criticism has incorporated a range of modern theoretical frameworks including stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism and Eastern poetics.
Constantine Athanasius Trypanis was a Greek classicist, literary critic, translator and poet.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar who specializes in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, where he served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He had previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Venkataraman Raghavan (1908–1979) was a Sanskrit scholar and musicologist. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Padma Bhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit, and authored over 120 books and 1200 articles.
Victor A. Friedman is an American linguist. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology. He has published numerous articles in English, Macedonian and Albanian.
Puthussery Ramachandran Pillai is an Indian poet of the Malayalam language. He is a scholar of Dravidian linguistics and has been a professor of Malayalam for more than three decades.
Anthony Philip Corbeill is an American professor of Classics. He is currently the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He was formerly a professor at the University of Kansas.
Francis Stephen Halliwell,, known as Stephen Halliwell, is a British classicist and academic. Since 1995 he has been Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews and Wardlaw Professor of Classics since 2014. Prior to that he taught at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge, and Birmingham. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, the Center for Ideas and Society, Roma Tre University, McMaster University, the Université catholique de Louvain, and Cornell University. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014.
