Keynote Speakers

Maria DiBattista – “Dereliction”

Maria DiBattista, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, has written extensively on modern literature, popular and pulp fiction, and film. Her books include Virginia Woolf: The Fables of Anon, First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction, which has two central chapters on Lawrence, Fast Talking Dames, Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography and Novel Characters: A Genealogy. She is presently co-writing a book with Deborah Nord on Women Novelists on and  Public Sphere and, with Emily Wittman, is editing the Cambridge Companion to Autobiography and a. more specialized collection of essays, Modernist Autobiography.

Colm Tóibín – “On Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers”

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona he produced two books, the novel The South (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and winner of the Irish Times/ Aer Lingus First Fiction Award) and Homage to Barcelona, both published in 1990. When he returned to Ireland in 1978 he worked as a journalist for In Dublin, Hibernia and The Sunday Tribune, becoming features editor of In Dublin in 1981 and editor of Magill, Ireland’s current affairs magazine, in 1982. He left Magill in 1985 and traveled in Africa and South America. His journalism from the 1980s was collected in The Trial of the Generals (1990). His other work as a journalist and travel writer includes Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). His other novels are: The Heather Blazing (1992, winner of the Encore Award); The Story of the Night (1996, winner of the Ferro-Grumley Prize); The Blackwater Lightship (1999, shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize and the Booker Prize and made into a film starring Angela Lansbury); The Master (2004, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize; the Prix du Meilleur Livre; the LA Times Novel of the Year; and shortlisted for the Booker Prize); Brooklyn (2009, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year). His short story collections are Mothers and Sons (2006, winner of the Edge Hill Prize) and The Empty Family (2010). His play Beauty in a Broken Place was performed at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 2004. His other books include: The Modern Library: the 200 Best Novels Since 1950 (with Carmen Callil); Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002); Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002) and All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James (2010). He has edited The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. His work has been translated into thirty languages. In 2008, a book of essays on his work ‘Reading Colm Toibin’, edited by Paul Delaney, was published. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster and from University College Dublin. He is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. In 2006 he was appointed to the Arts Council in Ireland. He has twice been Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and also been a visiting writer at the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He also taught at Princeton between 2009 and 2011, and was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in the autumn of 2011. He is currently Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His second collection of stories The Empty Family, published in 2010, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize. His collection of essays on Henry James, All a Novelist Needs, appeared also in 2010. In 2011 his play Testament, dirercted by Garry Hynes, was performed in the Dublin Theatre Festival with Marie Mullen in the lead role. Also in 2011, his memoir A Guest at the Feast was published by Penguin UK as a Kindle original. In 2012 his new collection of essays New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers & Their Families  appeared in 2013.

Other Speakers

Howard Booth – “Broken Baxter: Masculinity and Queer Melancholia in Sons and Lovers”

Howard J. Booth is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. The author of many articles on Lawrence, he edited New D.H. Lawrence (2009), and has also published on John Addington Symonds, E.M. Forster, Claude McKay, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Robert Byron. He has co-edited Modernism and Empire (with Nigel Rigby, 2000), and edited The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (2011).

Robert Caserio – “Sons and Lovers in Italy.”

Robert L. Caserio, Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of the English Novel (2012) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel (2009). His books include The English Novel 1900-1950: History and Theory  (1999).

Keith Cushman – “‘Feeling Oceanic’: Civilization and Discontented Paul.”

Keith Cushman, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is the Past President of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North
America.  He is the recipient of the Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Contributions to and Encouragement of Lawrence Studies.  He is the author of “D. H. Lawrence at Work,” the editor
of “The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell” and of Lawrence’s “Memoir of Maurice Magnus,” as well as the co-editor of four collections of essays about Lawrence.
He has published approximately forty essays about Lawrence and has lectured extensively on Lawrence and on modern American poetry throughout Europe and Asia.

Andrew Harrison – “‘I Tell You It Has Got Form – Form’: Plot, Structure and Meaning in Sons and Lovers”

Andrew Harrison is a lecturer in twentieth-century literature at the University of Nottingham, and Director of its D. H. Lawrence Research Centre. He has published widely on Lawrence; he is the co-editor (with John Worthen) of /D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: A Casebook/ (Oxford UP, 2005).

Peter Hitchcock – “The Collier’s Small, Mean Head: Class, Form, and Perfection”

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  At the GC he is also on the faculty of Women’s Studies and Film Studies Certificate Programs and an Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. His books include The Long Space, Dialogics of the Oppressed, and Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice.  He has written widely on cultural theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, and twentieth century literature and film.  His is currently completing two book projects, “The Worker Subjects” and “Seriality and Serialization.”

Jane Eldridge Miller – “‘I Shall Do My Work for Women, Better than the Suffrage’: The Conflicted Feminism of Sons and Lovers”

Jane Eldridge Miller is the author of Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (1994) and the editor of Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2001). She has published articles on D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, May Sinclair, and Violet Hunt, written reviews for the London Review of Books, and contributed entries on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers for the New Dictionary of National Biography. She was previously a Lecturer in English at Princeton University.

Seamus O’Malley – “Gardenflowers, Wildflowers and Machines.”

Seamus O’Malley is Lecturer at Stern College, Yeshiva University. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published on Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, W.B. Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Alan Moore, and has co-edited a volume of essays, Ford Madox Ford and America. He is currently a Postdoctoral Language  Lecturer at New York University.

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