Randall Fuller to deliver inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture on March 29


LAWRENCE – University of Kansas Distinguished Professor Randall Fuller will present “The Last Days and Forgotten Life of Martha E. Hunt, Transcendentalist” as his inaugural Distinguished Professor Lecture.

Randall Fuller

The event will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, March 29. Members of the KU community can register to attend the virtual Zoom webinar. The lecture will be recorded for those unable to attend and posted to the Faculty Development website.  

Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the KU Department of English, a rank he has held since August 2017. He will explore the lingering impression of Hunt, a mid-19th-century schoolteacher.

The story of Zenobia in “The Blithedale Romance” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is taken from the suicide of Martha Hunt, Fuller said. Standing at the periphery of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts, Hunt embraced its lessons of equality for women and its transformative intellectual lessons; however, the intellectual promise of her associations turned to despair and led her to suicide, illustrating the darker side of the movement.

Fuller’s book “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism” is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Fuller won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship in July 2020 to resurrect the leading female intellects of the Transcendentalist movement of early 19th-century America into a book.

“Most of my professional life has been concerned with trying to understand why various aspects of 19th-century American literature and culture continue to resonate so powerfully unto our present day,” Fuller said. “How did the desire to transcend everyday reality lead to the most important philosophical movement in America? How did the arrival of Darwinian theory challenge that philosophy, known as Transcendentalism? How did the fiery conflict of the Civil War alter that literature and philosophy? And how did women, who typically were not given much of a public platform at the time, contribute to these important strains of thought and writing?

“These are some of the questions that have preoccupied me.”

Fuller has written four other books on topics ranging from examining the Civil War’s influence on American literature to the rise of Americanists. His most recent book was published in January 2017, “The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation.”

He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri in 1986, his master's degree in 1995 from Washington University in St. Louis and a doctorate in 1999 from the same institution. He began his career by winning the Richard Beale Davis Award for Best Article Published by “Early American Literature” in 1999, year one of a six-year run as an assistant professor at Drury University before being promoted to associate professor and eventually a professor.

Fuller departed for the University of Tulsa in 2012, where he served as the Chapman Professor of English for five years, which overlapped with three years as the chair of the English department starting in August 2014. During that time, he was named a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellow. Fuller arrived at the University of Kansas in 2017 with the rank of distinguished professor. His written work has appeared in many publications, including the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, The New York Times, American Literary History and The Wall Street Journal.

Thu, 03/25/2021

author

Evan Riggs

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