Vassar College Department of English

Endowed Lectures

Thanks to generous endowments on the part of friends of the department, every year the department hosts readings and lectures by a remarkable group of well-known poets and writers, most of whom also meet with students.

The Elizabeth Bishop Poetry Series

Made possible through the gift of Priscilla H. Rockwell and H.P. Davis Rockwell. The 2007-2008 academic year Bishop Lecture by Harryette Mullen was followed this year by Li-Young Lee.

The Writer in Residence program

Funded through a generous contribution of an anonymous donor. Every year the department sponsors a writer in residence who meets with various writing classes over a three week period and gives a lecture/reading. The 2007-2008 writer in residence was National Book Award nominee Lydia Davis and this year's will be ZZ Packer.

The Gifford Lecture

Established by former students and friends who endowed a fund to honor William Gifford’s distinguished commitment to the craft of writing and his generous mentorship of individual students upon the occasion of his retirement from the Vassar faculty. The 2007-2008 academic year Gifford Lecturer Michael Ondaatje was followed this year by George Saunders We are delighted to announce that the 2009-2010 Gifford Lecturer will be Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Díaz, who will help us commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Africana Studies Program in conjunction with the Hispanic Studies and the American Culture programs.

Lecture Series

Aside from endowed lectures and readings, we invite scholars and writers according three broad rubrics serving the interests of our diverse faculty, English majors, and the student body in general. In these series we attempt whenever possible to schedule or co-sponsor lectures of common interest to multidisciplinary programs. The three lecture series are:

1. First Proof: lectures and readings by young writers, most of them who have just published their first work;
2. Primary Sources: lectures by eminent scholars who are mapping new fields or are the most prominent voices in the existing disciplines; and 
3. Public Voices, which invites speakers who are adept at crossing the divisions not only between genres but between also academic institutions and the broader world outside.

Lectures and readings during the 2007-2008 academic year included the writer and Washington Post literary editor, Michael Dirda; poet Simon Armitage; and best-selling author, Mohsin Hamid.  Other visitors whose lectures we sponsored or co-sponsored included the New Yorker cartoonist Jules Feiffer; poet Peter Kane Default; hip-hop writer Jeff Chang; film-maker Sanjay Kak; writer and assistant professor of English at West Point Elizabeth Samet; writer, publisher, and Vassar alumna Renee Gladman; FBI whistle-blower Colleen Rowley; writer and assistant professor of English at Bard College Mary Caponegro; award-winning novelist Peter Carey; and (with the American Culture program) the distinguished Native-American poets  Janet McAdams, Gordon Henry, and Kimberly Blaeser.

This year’s (2008-2009) lectures and readings include prominent postcolonial academics Rob Nixon and Anne McClintock (Primary Sources); new writers like Mark Sarvas, Paige Ackerson-Kiely,  Ed Park and Rivka Galchen (First Proofs); as well as public intellectuals such as the cultural theorist and critic, Luc Sante, and New Yorker critic and Harvard Professor James Wood (Public Voices).