About The Lectures

Ellmann Lectures Founder

Ron Schuchard

Professor Emeritus

Founded in 1988 by Professor Emeritus, Ron Schuchard, the Ellmann Lectures have been transformative for the humanities at Emory, the engagement of students, faculty, and the wider Atlanta community, and the enrichment of the literary collections at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

Ellmann Lectures Director

Geraldine Higgins

Associate Professor of English

Director of Irish Studies

Director of the Ellmann lectures since 2017, Geraldine Higgins is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Irish Studies Program at Emory. Her publications include Brian Friel (Writers and their Work, 2009), Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (Palgrave, 2012), and Seamus Heaney in Context ed. (Cambridge, 2021).

She is the curator of the National Library of Ireland’s acclaimed exhibition, “Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again,” open at the Bank of Ireland cultural centre in Dublin from 2018-2025. A traveling version of “Listen Now Again” will be on display in March 2024 in the Chace Gallery at the Schwartz Center.

Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Carla Freeman

Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

As the new home for the Ellmann Lectures, Emory College’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry is the focal point for humanities endeavors at Emory University and serves to advance research, teaching, public engagement, and programming across all humanistic fields. Carla Freeman serves as director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory.

From 2014-2023 she served as Interim Dean and Dean of Faculty of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. A Cultural Anthropologist of globalization and labor, Freeman's research examines the changing nature of work/life in the 20th and 21st centuries. With over 30 years of fieldwork experience in the Caribbean, her publications include High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), Entrepreneurial Selves (Duke University Press, 2014), and Global Middle Classes (with Rachel Heiman and Mark Liechty, SAR Press).

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library

Jennifer Gunter King

Director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library

Emory’s Rose Library has been entwined with the Ellmann Lectures since the very beginning. After Seamus Heaney gave the inaugural lectures in 1988, he donated his manuscripts and notes for the lectures to the library, later published as The Place of Writing. From that date onwards, the directors of the Rose Library have fostered connections and engagement with the lecturers to build Emory’s rich archival holdings. With a focus on making the archives accessible, Jennifer Gunter King has continued to seek partnerships and pathways to broaden online access to the archives, to enable inspiration and study to all, regardless of resources to travel. With her encouragement, several Ellmann lecturers have returned to the Rose to "visit themselves" in the archives and to give talks for the wider community.