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Johnson at Bucknell:
A Tercentenary Celebration

2009 is the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, one of the great writers of eighteenth-century England, and, along with Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Borges, one of a handful of humanists in the European tradition whose writings in a variety of genres continue to challenge and extend our philosophical, moral and literary experiences.

The Bucknell Humanities Institute, supported by the Office of the Provost, will commemorate Johnson’s life and work, his contribution to the western literary tradition, to the American tradition of liberal education, and to his continuing place in the curriculum on college campuses such as Bucknell. On March 23-24, 2009 Bucknell will host a number of events to which students, faculty, trustees, invitees, staff, alumni, and the public will be welcome.

Provisional list of events

• Lectures by Christopher Ricks and Leo Damrosch.
• Poetry reading by David Ferry.
• Public discussion about Johnson, literature and criticism today with Christopher Ricks, Leo Damrosch, Greg Clingham, Philip Smallwood, Adam Rounce, and others.
• Exhibit of Johnsonian books and artifacts in the Bertrand Library.
• Reception and dinner.
• Luncheon and discussion with students.
• Dramatic reading of (scenes from) G.K. Chesterton’s play The Judgment of Dr. Johnson (1927).
• A Bucknell University Press publication commemorating the event.

The Lecturers

Christopher Ricks. Sarah B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and formerly King Edward Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Author and editor of (among others) Milton’s Grand Style (1963), The Poems of  Tennyson (1969), Keats and Embarrassment (1974), The Force of Poetry (1984), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), A.E. Housman (1988), T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Essays in Appreciation (1996), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by TS Eliot (1996), Reviewery (2002), Allusion to the Poets (2002), and Dylan’s Vision of Sin (2004).

Leo Damrosch. Ernest Birnbaum Professor of English, Harvard University. Author of Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (1972), The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism (1976), Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (1980), God’s Plot’s and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (1985), Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (1987), The Sorrows of Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (1996), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005), a National Book Award finalist and winner of the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award for the best book of non fiction. Recipient of (among others) a NEH Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

David Ferry. Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Author of numerous books of poetry and translation, including His Epistles of Horace: A Translation (2001), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998), Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993), Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983), On the Way to the Island (1960), and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems (1959). Recipient of (among others) a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine.