Thursday, November 16, 2006

Writer: Suzi Wong, 706/542-9867, swong@uga.edu
Contact: Douglas Anderson, 706/542-9266, anderson@uga.edu

UGA symposium celebrates homecoming of recipients of Hugh Kenner Travel Awards

Athens, Ga. – On Thursday, Nov. 30, the University of Georgia’s department of English will host the first Hugh Kenner Travel Awards Symposium, featuring talks by recipients of travel grants generated by the support of the Hugh Kenner Professorship Fund.  Aggie Ebrahimi, an M.A. student specializing in multicultural American literature; Lara Glenum, a Ph.D. student in creative writing; and Susan Rosenbaum, assistant professor in the English department, will guide the audience in armchair travel to the sites of their recent research. The reception and symposium, free and open to the public, will take place in the North Tower of the Student Learning Center from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.

Ebrahimi’s Kenner grant allowed her to travel to New York City to further explore her research interests by spending time in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection and its newly acquired Jack Kerouac Archives. Glenum traveled to Prague where she conducted archival research, which allowed her to complete a critical introduction to a book she is co-writing on the late modernist poet Vladimir Holan. Rosenbaum used her grant to travel to Leiden, The Netherlands, to participate in a three-day conference, titled “The Rhetoric of Sincerity,” where she presented a paper based on her forthcoming book.

Hugh Kenner (right), Fuller E. Callaway and Franklin College of the Arts and Sciences Professor of English at UGA from 1990 to1999, was internationally acclaimed for his critical studies of English-language literary modernism, especially The Pound Era (1971). He authored more than thirty books and nearly a thousand articles. Born in Peterborough, Ontario, Kenner received his B.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from Yale.  He taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Johns Hopkins University before his professorship at UGA. Kenner died on Nov. 24, 2003, at his home in Athens.

When a young Hugh Kenner accompanied his teacher Marshall McLuhan to Washington, D.C., to visit Ezra Pound, the poet instructed Kenner, “You have the obligation to meet the great minds of your time.” Kenner heard and heeded, traveling to meet writers to further elucidate his understanding of the giants of modern literature (Eliot, Beckett, Joyce, Lewis, and Moore, among them).  “[Kenner] said, ‘I am the last man alive to have heard Ezra Pound’s impersonation of Henry James.’ When I consider the loss of Hugh Kenner, this is where I begin,” says UGA alumnus Sam Prestridge, who took Kenner’s seminar.

At a celebration of Kenner’s life at the UGA Chapel in April 2004, the Kenner family and UGA announced a desire to create the Hugh Kenner Professorship.  The purpose of the professorship is to support young scholars who pursue a creative, interdisciplinary approach to the study of English literature, in the spirit of Kenner, whose works bridged the humanities with mathematics, technology, architecture, and the sciences. Of Kenner’s legacy of enriching travel, 2006 award recipient Glenum says, “Hugh Kenner had an uncanny ability to walk through walls, initiating and sustaining personal contact with a stellar cast of Modernists whose work shaped his critical enterprises over a lifetime. The Hugh Kenner Travel Grant has allowed me to pass through significant barriers as well.”

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