KU News Release

Eminent feminist scholar to present Holmes lecture

Susan Gubar

LAWRENCE — Eminent feminist scholar and co-author of the landmark book “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination” will present the Alice F. Holmes Summer Institute for Literature Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 12, in the conference room of the Hall Center for the Humanities.

Susan Gubar, a distinguished professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University, will present “Snapshots of Feminism, Present Tense.” The event is free and open to the public.

“ ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ was a groundbreaking work that changed the way many critics thought about literature,” said Dorice Williams Elliott, chair of the Department of English.

The book, co-authored with Sandra M. Gilbert in 1979, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award. In 1985, the collaborators received a Ms. Woman of the Year award for their compilation of the “Norton Anthology of Literature of Women.” Among their many collaborations, Gilbert and Gubar published a critical trilogy titled “No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.” The three volumes — “The War of the Words” (1988), “Sexchanges” (1989) and “Letters from the Front” (1994) — use feminist criticism to understand the achievements of British and American literary women in modern times.

The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, Gubar’s solo work includes a book on the centrality of cross-racial masquerade in American fiction, photography, painting and film: “Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture” (1997). Her cultural biography of Judas, the 12th apostle, will be published by W. W. Norton later this year.

The Alice F. Holmes Summer Institute for Literature was established and endowed by Wendell S. Holmes and his daughters, Nancy Holmes and Sally H. McPherson, in honor of their wife and mother, Alice F. Holmes, in 1991. Since that time, KU’s English department has annually hosted a significant literary scholar who teaches a two-week graduate summer seminar in his or her specialization and delivers a lecture that is open to the public. Professors of British literature and American literature are invited on an alternating basis.

Previous Holmes professors include Mary Poovey, New York University, noted Victorianist, new historicist and cultural critic; Eric Sundquist, Americanist, University of California-Los Angeles, who also received the 2008 KU Distinguished Alumni Award; and Susan K. Harris, Mark Twain scholar and currently KU’s Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture.

KU Endowment manages the funds for the institute. KU Endowment is the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment is the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.

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