Prominent Literary Scholar to Speak at UNM

Marjorie Perloff, a prominent scholar of modern literature and the retiring president of the Modern Language Association, will speak at the University of New Mexico on Friday, Jan. 19, at 3:30 p.m. in Woodward 147. The event is free and open to the public.

Perloff will be introduced by her longtime associate, UNM Provost Reed Way Dasenbrock. She will then present, “'It Must Change': The Future of English Studies.”

Last year, she served as president of the Modern Language Association, the umbrella organization for all teachers of English and foreign languages in higher education. Her presentation will include observations she has made about teaching language and literature during her tenure in office as well as her long and distinguished career as a professor and critic.

Perloff is the author of a string of books about the poetry and avant-garde movements of the past century, including 21st Century Modernism, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, The Futurist Moment, and Poetic license: essays on modernist and postmodernist lyric. She has also published individual volumes on such famous modern poets as Ezra Pound, Frank O’Hara and Robert Lowell. Her most recent book is The Vienna Moment: A Memoir (2004).

Perloff received her Ph.D. from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in 1965. Over the next decade, she taught there and at the University of Maryland. In 1976 she moved to California, where she held endowed chairs at the University of Southern California (1976-1986) and Stanford (1986—). For the past five years, since officially retiring, she has continued to publish prolifically and to teach at Stanford as the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita.

The event is sponsored by the Department of English. For more information, contact David Richard Jones, chair, Department of English, 228-4740 or djones@unm.edu.

Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu