Roger E. Stoddard Bibliography as the Scaffolding of Literature "The Book as a Spiritual Instrument." Divagations. Digressions.   Tuesday March 18 6 p.m.       Christopher Ricks & Archie Burnett A. E. Housman: A Life in Letters   Thursday April 3 6 p.m.   David Womersley Biting and Smoking: The Pleasures and Challenges of Editing Swift   Thursday April 10 6 p.m.

Four of the World’s Leading Literary & Bibliographical Scholars

Roger E. Stoddard spent his professional career at the Houghton Library, retiring in 2004 as Curator of Rare Books in the Harvard College Library, Senior Curator in the Houghton Library, and Senior Lecturer on English. He holds appointments as Associate of the Department of English and American Literature and Language, and he works from a carrel in the book stacks of the H. E. Widener Memorial Library. During the past year he has published bibliographies of Andrée Chedid (Benoît Forgeot), Primo Levi (The Book Collector), and Jacques-Charles Brunet (B. Quaritch Ltd.). Forthcoming is his bibliography of W. G. Sebald (The Book Collector). He is working with the publication committee of the Bibliographical Society of America to bring to publication his bibliography of American poetry printed between 1610 and 1820.

Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director (with Archie Burnett) of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. At present he is the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and President of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. His numerous books include Essays in Appreciation (1996), Beckett's Dying Words (1993), T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), and Keats and Embarassment (1974). He has edited the poems of Tennyson, Browning, and Housman and is editor of The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) and The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999). He published Dylan's Visions of Sin in 2003.

Archie Burnett was born in Scotland and educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. He has been a Junior Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and Professor and Head of English at Oxford Brookes University, and he is currently Co-Director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University. He is an established Milton scholar, but he is best known for his scholarly Oxford editions of The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997) and The Letters of A. E. Housman (2007). He has begun work on a complete edition, with commentary, of The Poems of Philip Larkin for Faber & Faber.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. His publications include The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1988), a three-volume edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin, 1994), a collection of Contemporary Responses to Gibbon (Thoemmes, 1997), and Gibbon and the Watchmen of the Holy City: The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815 (Oxford, 2002). He has also edited Edmund Burke’s Pre-Revolutionary Writings (Penguin, 1998); current projects include a forthcoming edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Penguin). He is a General Editor of The Complete Writings of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge University Press), for which he is editing the volume devoted to Gulliver’s Travels.