The 36th Josephine Gessner Ferguson Lecture: WHY POE-- AND THE HUMANITIES-- MATTER

This talk will offer a rapid tour of Poe's key tales, emphasizing his uncanny foresight into our precarious modern world. Michael Capuzzo, writing for the Smithsonian in 2019, called Poe "the most influential American author ever." That's a big claim, yet it's arguably true. This talk explains why Poe still speaks to us so compellingly—and how his work typifies the continuing importance of the humanities (and reading books!) in an age of AI, digital communication, and online work.

Our guest this year: J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University and former chair of the English Department. He is the author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (Yale 1987) and Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford 2016). He has edited the Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford 2001) and the Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin 2008). He co-edited with Jerome McGann Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (LSU Press 2012) and with Leland S. Person The American Novel to 1870 (Oxford 2014). He has appeared in several documentaries on Poe, including Edgar A. Poe: Buried Alive (PBS 2017), and with Scott Peeples, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019). He also edited The Life of Black Hawk (Penguin Classics 2008). As a modernist scholar, he published Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale 1993), edited Modern American Short Story Sequences (Cambridge 1995), and with Jackson R. Bryer co-edited French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad (St. Martins   1998). He was Advisory Editor for the first three volumes of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge 2011, 2013, 2015) and with Michael Von Cannon and Valerie Hemingway, he is co-editing the final volume of the Letters, 1957-1961. His Norton Critical Edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time appeared in 2022. He is also currently completing a cultural biography of Poe for W. W. Norton.