Advisory Board and Committee Members

Advisory Board Members

Carolyn Forché, Chair of the Advisory Board

Carolyn Forché is the former Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and a University Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University. She is most recently the author of the poetry collection In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin, 2020) and the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019). She is also the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forché is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993) and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W. W. Norton, 2014). She has been a human rights activist for thirty years.

Penn Szittya

Penn Szittya is the former Chair of the English Department at Georgetown University, where he specialized in medieval poetics and social practice. He also taught at Emory, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Boston University. He helped launch the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

David Ungerleider, S.J.

David Ungerleider holds numerous degrees, including a BA in Philosophy and Letters from St. Louis University and an MA in Social Anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City. Ungerleider entered the Society of Jesus in 1969 and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1977. He was a Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco and the Universidad Olmeca, in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. He has also served as the director of several nonprofit organizations and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sharron Lannan

Sharron Lannan graduated with her BA and MA in English from Georgetown University (’90 and ’91). She currently runs an interior design company in Miami, Florida, and her designs have been published in both books and magazines. Sharron has sat on the literary committee at the Lannan Foundation for thirteen years, and she served on the Lannan Foundation Board from 2003-2009.

Mark McMorris

Mark McMorris has been a member of the Georgetown English Department since 1997. He founded and previously directed the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice from 2006-2009. Previously, he was Director of Lannan Literary Programs from 1999-2003 and 2004-2005. His critical essays take up questions of colonialism and diaspora, avant-garde, translation, and performance in American and Anglophone poetry. With degrees from Columbia University and Brown University, he has held visiting and short-term positions at UC Berkeley, Brown University, Queen’s University Belfast, and Naropa University. He is most recently the author of The Book of Landings (2016, Wesleyan University Press), a two-volume work of poetry; Entrepôt (Coffee House, 2010); and The Café at Light (Roof Books, 2004), a text of lyric dialogue and prose.

Dinaw Mengestu

Photo by Eli Meir Kaplan/Getty Images for Home Front Communications

Dinaw Mengestu is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Each of his novels; The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names; has been well received by critics across the world. A 2012 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Mengestu has also reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. He was Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University in the spring of 2007 and the Lannan Foundation Chair in Poetics from 2012-2015. He lives in New York City.

Lannan Committee Members

David Gewanter

David Gewanter is the author of four books of poetry: Fort Necessity (2018), War Bird (2009), The Sleep of Reason (2003), and In the Belly (1997), all published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also co-editor, with Frank Bidart, of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (2007). He earned a BA in Intellectual History from the University of Michigan, an MA, and Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley, and then ran writing programs at Harvard. His work appears in Threepenny Review, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and New England Review, among others. His honors include the Whiting Emerging Writer’s Award, the Witter Bynner Fellowship (US Library of Congress), and a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship. Gewanter is a professor of English at Georgetown University and former director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

Duncan Wu

Duncan Wu has been a Professor of English Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, is a former Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written extensively on the poetry and prose of the Romantic period and reviews films for Times Higher Education. He worked with Carolyn Forché on a sequel to her anthology Against Forgetting: Poetry of Witness, published by Norton in 2013.

Past Committee Members

Nathan Hensley

Nathan K. Hensley works on nineteenth-century British literature (fiction, poetry, and political writing), critical theory, and the novel. His other interests include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of globalization. His book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2016), explores how literary writers of the Victorian period expanded the capacities of their medium to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.

Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe held the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University from 2010-2012. Irish-American poet, novelist and essayist, she is among the most widely read experimental writers. Howe is the author of more than twenty books and the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2009 Ruth Lilly Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Her recent works include Lyrics: The Poems, and two prose collections, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation and The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life.

Sherry Linkon

Sherry Lee Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University. From 1997 to 2012, she was Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. With John Russo, she co-authored Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Kansas, 2002) and co-edited New Working-Class Studies (Cornell, 2005). In addition to her work on deindustrialization and working-class culture, Linkon does research on student learning in the humanities and on social class in U.S. higher education. She was the founding President of the Working-Class Studies Association, and she edits a weekly blog, Working-Class Perspectives.

Mark McMorris

Patricia O’Connor

Patricia E. O’Connor is a sociolinguist and Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. Her work in prisons, jails, and drug treatment centers situates her narrative research. Author of Speaking of Crime (2000), co-author of Literacy Behind Bars (1994), co-editor of Reflections special issue on Prison Literacies (2004), editor of “Discourse and Violence” volume of Discourse and Society (1995), she also contributed to Discourse and Silencing (Thiesmeyer, ed. 2003) and Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity (Wodak, ed. 2003). O’Connor teaches courses in Humanities and Writing; Critical methods: Narratology; Persuasive Writing; Narratives of Violence; Narratives of Migration; Prison Literature; Working Class Literature; and Appalachian Literature. With the Lannan Center, O’Connor is particularly interested in outreach to disadvantaged communities and to collaborating with Georgetown University in Qatar where she has taught a number of years.

Cóilín Parsons

Cóilín Parsons is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University. His first book, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (2016) was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature and the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. He is co-editor of the volume Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (2015), and another coedited volume, Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism is forthcoming in Syracuse University Press’s Irish Studies series. Before coming to Georgetown in 2012, he taught at the University of Cape Town and at Columbia University.

Samantha Pinto

Samantha Pinto is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on African, African Diaspora, and Postcolonial Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas, a book on literary aesthetics, diaspora studies, and feminist thought (Forthcoming, NYU Press, 2013). She is currently working on a second book project on African Diaspora celebrities and human rights.

Andrew Rubin

Andrew N. Rubin served as an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University for twelve years. He is the author of Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2012), and the co-editor of both Adorno: A Critical Reader and The Edward Said Reader. He has written on the subject of twentieth-century culture and politics for magazines and journals including The South Atlantic Quarterly, Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics, The Journal of Palestine Studies, The Nation magazine, The New Statesman, and al-Ahram. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Exiled in America: José Marti, Theodor Adorno, C.L.R. James, and Edward W. Said.