Jerome McGann - 10/5/09
3:30 pm, Hill Memorial Library
John Steward Bryan University Professor of English
University of Virginia

A specialist in Romantic and Victorian studies, a major textual scholar and theorist, and a pioneer in digital editing and site construction, Professor McGann is a leading scholar in literary studies in the United States. He is one of the founders of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and the primary creator of the online Rossetti Archive. In addition to major editions of Byron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others, his most groundbreaking critical works are The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983), A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983, 1992), The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985), Social Values and Poetic Acts (1987), Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), The Textual Condition (1991), Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (1994 ), Radiant Textuality: Literature Since the World Wide Web (2001), and The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World (2006).

Cynthia L. Selfe - 10/8/09
3:30 pm, 151 Coates
Humanities Distinguished Professor of English
The Ohio State University

Co-founder of Computers and Composition Digital Press, Professor Selfe was recognized in 1996 as an EDUCOM Medal winner for innovative computer use in higher education, and in 2000 as the winner of the Outstanding Technology Innovator Award presented by the CCCC Committee on Computers. Co-editor of Computers and Composition: An International Journal , Selfe has authored, co-authored, edited and co-edited numerous books on computers in composition studies including Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers (2007) , Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (2007) , Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States (2004), Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (2004) , Literacy and Technology in the 21 st Century, the Perils of Not Paying Attention (1999) , Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History (1996) .

Francine Prose - 1/2010

President of the PEN-American Center from 2008-09, Francine Prose is one of America's most admired novelists and short-story writers, as well as a distinguished critic and essayist. Besides writing for children and young adults, she has also published nonfiction on the life of Caravaggio, as well as The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired . Among her fourteen novels, Household Saints has been adapted for a movie and The Glorious Ones was adapted as a musical, which was produced at Lincoln Center . A graduate of Radcliffe College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Francine Prose has also been a finalist for the National Book Award. A Changed Man was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006), a New York Times bestseller, was reviewed by National Public Radio as an “absolutely necessary addition to the personal library of anyone who is a writer or dreams of writing...”