The Department of English is pleased to announce the 2026 Yusko Ward-Phillips Lecture, "Elegy and Its Others: Grief Poems in Intermedial Dialogue" by Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
How do contemporary poets renew and expand the repertoire of the poetry of mourning? Often they do so, this talk argues, by befriending, challenging, and interacting with other forms of remembering and grieving the dead, such as monuments, obituaries, and photographs. While intermedial and intergeneric crossings may blur the lines between elegy and its others, they also illuminate the distinctive grief work of poetry.
Reception to follow.
About Jahan Ramazani
Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Poetry in a Global Age (2020); Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2014); A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for the best book in comparative literary history (2008 to 2010); The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He is the editor of “Poetry and Race,” a special of New Literary History (2019), and of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017); a co-editor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018, 2024); an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012); and the incoming general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark.
About the Yusko Ward-Phillips Lecture Series
The Yusko Ward-Phillips Lecture honors two devoted and distinguished former professors of English at the University of Notre Dame: Leo L. Ward, C.S.C., and Charles Phillips. Honored as a writer of short fiction, Rev. Ward began teaching at Notre Dame in 1929. He was appointed chair of the Department of English in 1936, a position he held until his death in 1953. Charles Phillips joined the faculty in 1924. A poet, critic, and playwright, he was instrumental in the development of the University’s theater program and was one of the University’s most popular
instructors until his death in 1933. The Ward-Phillips Lectures were inaugurated as a lecture series in 1966, and are generously funded by the Yusko Endowment for the Department of English. Past Yusko Ward-Phillips lecturers include Elie Wiesel, Cornel West, Edward Said, Seamus Heaney, Terry Eagleton, Margaret Atwood, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, and Amitav Ghosh.