About The Lectures
The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, now among the most prominent in North America, were established in honor of Richard Ellmann (1918–1987), who served Emory University as the first Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 to 1987.
For more than 40 years, Ellmann’s writing set the highest standards of critical inquiry and humanistic scholarship. The biographer of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde, Ellmann’s public lectures were unparalleled in their appeal to a worldwide audience of readers. Ellmann always spoke in a language that invited the reader to share his or her personal engagement with serious literature.
The Ellmann Lecture series has since welcomed authors such as Seamus Heaney, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie to Emory's campus. In 2024, the Ellman Lectures became housed in the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and hosted award-winning authors Natasha Tretheway and Fintan O'Toole for the theme "Writing Lives." Read The Emory Report for a full history of the series.
About the Leadership
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.
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Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
benjamin reiss
Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English
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. Benjamin Reiss serves as director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry andSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English.
A faculty member at Emory since 2006, he served as chair of the Department of English from 2017-2023 and has led initiatives at Emory on public humanities, disability studies, and undergraduate curriculum development. In 2021, he was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education (Laney Graduate School). He is currently co-PI on a grant from the Teagle Foundation to develop undergraduate curricular pathways to promote humanistic thinking for students in all disciplines.
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Ellmann Lectures Founder AND FORMER DIRECTOR
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.
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