Behind the Public Scholar/ship: A conversation with Writer Rowan Ricardo Philips

Stanford Public Humanities in partnership with the New York Institute for the Humanities invites you to join an engaging virtual conversation about public scholarship and the craft of writing between Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Blakey Vermeule. They will discuss topics such as Phillips' trajectory from doctoral study in English Literature to writing within the public humanities as well as his modes of engagement with writing and thoughts about its horizons now There will be plenty of time for questions from the audience as well. 

(Please note the event will be an open format rather than a webinar, but you are welcome to have your camera off).

Please register here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University where he earned his Ph.D. in English Literature. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and most recently, Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Also a renowned sportswriter, Phillips is a curatorial consultant to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, will be published by FSG in 2025. 

Blakey Vermeule is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in Stanford's English department and the co-director of Stanford Public Humanities. She is the author of three books, one on eighteenth-century moral psychology and literature, one on the theory of literary characters, and one on the ancient debate between the active life and the contemplative life (co-authored with Jennifer Summit). Her current project is about the post-Freudian conception of the unconscious mind.