The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA is pleased to announce the first annual Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture, to be given by Professor Maud Ellmann. The lecture will be titled ‘The Salesman Only Rings Once: Julian Maclaren-Ross and the Vacuum Cleaner in the 1930s’ and will take place in the Curve Auditorium at The Forum, Norwich on Thursday 14th June 2018 at 5.30pm. The lecture will be introduced by Professor Vic Sage, and followed by a wine reception. A symposium exploring Professor Ellmann’s will take place at UEA on Friday 15th June. Invited speakers at the symposium include Ian Patterson (Cambridge), Nicholas Royle (Sussex), Clair Wills (Princeton), Robert Young (NYU), Rachel Potter (UEA), Karen Schaller (UEA), Lyndsey Stonebridge (UEA), and Matthew Taunton (UEA). For further information or to register, please go tohttps://lornasagelecture.com/. Both events are free and open to all, but advance booking is essential.
UEA is also making available two postgraduate bursaries, to cover UK standard-class rail travel and one night’s accommodation on campus. All students registered on a postgraduate degree in English or a related discipline are eligible. To apply, interested postgraduates should email a brief account (300 words) of why the lecture and symposium will be useful to their research to m.taunton@uea.ac.uk. The deadline is midday on Wednesday 23rd May 2018.
Maud Ellmann is Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She is a leading figure in modernist studies, with wide-ranging interests in psychoanalysis, feminism and critical theory. Her publications include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Harvard, 1987), The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Harvard, 1993), Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (ed.) (Longman, 1994), Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh, 2003) and The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge, 2010).
Lorna Sage (1943–2001) was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. She held degrees from Durham and Birmingham, and was appointed assistant lecturer at UEA in 1965, shortly after the university was founded. From the 1970s she was a prominent critic and reviewer for newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, the Observer and the London Review of Books. In 1981 she was appointed Florence B. Tucker visiting professor at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, but she returned to UEA in 1985 to take up the post of Dean of the School of English and American studies, becoming a professor in 1994. As a scholar who specialised in modern fiction by women writers, Sage produced editions of books by Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, among others, and wrote important studies of Doris Lessing and Angela Carter. She also published two collection of critical essays, Women in the House of Fiction (1992) and Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers (2001), and edited the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999). Her childhood memoir,Bad Blood (2000), won the Whitbread prize for biography shortly before her death in January 2001. A posthumous collection of her journalism, Good as Her Word, appeared in 2003, edited by her former husband, Professor Vic Sage, and their daughter, Sharon.