Vera Kutzinski to speak on literary scholarship

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Vera Kutzinski, the new Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, will be introduced to the community on Monday, Feb. 14, with an inaugural lecture in the rotunda of the Wyatt Center.

Kutzinski, also director of the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt, will lecture at 4 p.m. on “The Task of the Literary Scholar.”

Inspired in part by Walter Benjamin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kutzinski will explore the origins of public perceptions that literary scholars are either “quaint” or “wacky,” and that literary scholarship has little relevance outside of professional academic circles.

A reception will follow the lecture. The event is free and open to the public. The Wyatt Center is on the campus of Vanderbilt‘s Peabody College, near the intersection of Capers Avenue and 21st Avenue South.

Kutzinski joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2004 after 18 years at Yale University. Her research interests include U.S., Caribbean and Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published three books and is working on another about Langston Hughes in the Americas.

Kutzinski is developing the Center for the Americas to carry out interdisciplinary research designed to improve the lives of people living in the Americas.

Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu

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