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."
About the Leadership
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.
View Biography
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.
View Biography
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).
View Biography
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.
