“The Making of the American Public Intellectual”

What: The Trinity College American Studies Department welcomes Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, as this year’s Jan Cohn Visiting Scholar.  Buell, a leading authority on literary transcendentalism and a pioneer in the field of environmental criticism, will give a lecture entitled, “The Making of the American Public Intellectual.”  This event is free and open to the public.  A reception will follow.

When: Wednesday, October 14 ~ 4:30 p.m.

Where: Rittenberg Lounge, Mather Hall, on the Trinity College campus. 

Background: The Jan Cohn Lecture is an annual lecture dealing with topics relating to American Studies, culture, and history. The lecture honors the memory of Jan Cohn, G. Keith Funston Professor of American Literature and American Studies and the first woman to serve as Dean of the Faculty at Trinity College.
 

Professor Lawrence Buell (photo: Harvard News)

Lawrence Buell is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. He earned his A.B. at Princeton and his Ph.D. from Cornell, both in English. His research interests include issues of cultural nationalism, and comparatist approaches to American literary study including transatlantic and postcolonial models of inquiry. He is the author of Literary Transcendentalism (1973), New England Literary Culture (1986), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001), Emerson (2003), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). He is co-editor, with Wai Chee Dimock, of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). 

Writing for an Endangered World won the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations' Cawelti Prize for the Best Book of 2001 in the field of American Cultural Studies and Emerson won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism. Buell won the 2007 Jay Hubbell Award, Modern Language Association, American Literature Group, for lifetime contributions to American literary studies.

This event is free and open to the public.  For more information, please contact the American Studies Program at 860-297-4228.
 

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