By Erika Mantz, Media Relations

Jonathan Culler, chair of the English Department at Cornell University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, will present “Doing Cultural Studies” Friday, Feb. 24, 2006, from noon-1 p.m. in Hamilton Smith 101 at the University of New Hampshire. The talk, sponsored by the English Department’s First Fridays series, is free and open to the public.

Culler’s talk will consider how the term "cultural studies" has the potential to unify various strains of scholarship within a general interdisciplinary discourse on the nature of knowledge itself. In particular, it will consider the relationship between cultural studies and literary theory.

Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 at St. John's College, Oxford University, after accepting a Rhodes scholarship upon his graduation from Harvard in 1966. His interests include literary theory and the history of modern literary criticism, English poetry since 1600, and 19th and 20th century French literature. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Culler has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association for his book “Structuralist Poetics” in 1975. He has served on the advisory boards for several academic journals, including “College English”, “PMLA”, and “Diacritics.” Most recently, he published “Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena” and “The Literary in Theory,” both with Stanford University Press.