Plenary Speakers

Jahan Ramazani

Jahan Ramazani is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia , where he has taught since receiving his PhD at Yale in 1988. He held the Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship from 2001 to 2004, was Chair of the Faculty Senate from 1997 to 1998, and is serving as Department Chair from 2006 to 2009. He is the author of three books on modern and contemporary poetry: Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (Yale University Press, 1990), Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (University of Chicago Press, 1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which includes the chapter “Irony and Postcoloniality: Louise Bennett's Anancy Poetics.” He is completing the manuscript of a book to be called A Transnational Poetics . He edited, with late editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003); he also edited with Jon Stallworthy The Twentieth Century and After in The Norton Anthology of English Literature , eighth edition (2006)—anthologies that include Bennett's work for the first time. In 1997, he won the William Riley Parker Prize for the year's best essay in PMLA , and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, and a Rhodes Scholarship. In the fall of 2005, he won the inaugural Jefferson Scholars Faculty Prize for leadership, scholarship, and citizenship at the University of Virginia .

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