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Caryl Phillips Is Montgomery Fellow

Writer to teach summer term literature course

TIME magazine called Caryl Phillips’s novel, A Distant Shore, “one of literature’s great meditations on race and identity.” The author of nine novels, three works of nonfiction, pieces for radio, television, film, and the stage, Phillips will be at Dartmouth for the summer term as a Montgomery Fellow. Phillips’s work has been honored with numerous international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for A Distant Shore (2003); Crossing the River was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1993.

Writer Caryl Phillips will give a public reading of his work in July. (Photo courtesy of Caryl Phillips)

As a visiting professor in the Department of English, Phillips will be teaching the course Race and Class in Postwar British Fiction. “This is terrific for Dartmouth,” says Gretchen Gerzina, chair of English and the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography. “It will be very exciting for students to work with such a well-known writer.” Phillips, she continues, “is an important voice not only in modern literature, but also on social issues.”

Phillips spoke at Dartmouth in October 2007 in conjunction with the Northeastern American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference, Transatlantic Destinies. Organized by Peter Cosgrove, associate professor of English, the conference marked the bicentennial of the end of the British slave trade. Phillips read his account of Francis Barber, who was servant to 18th century writer Samuel Johnson, from his most recent book, Foreigners.

Born in St. Kitts, West Indies; raised in Leeds, England; and a B.A. (Honours) graduate of The Queens College, Oxford University, Phillips now lives in New York, and is a professor of English at Yale University. His public Montgomery Fellow lecture, “‘Growing Pains’: A Reading by Caryl Phillips,” is scheduled for Tuesday, July 15, at 4 p.m. in Filene Auditorium (Moore Hall).

Montgomery Fellows for fall 2008 have also been announced:

Joan Didion, author, essayist, and screenwriter, will be at Dartmouth October 6 through 8. Her works include the National Book Award winning memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which Didion adapted for Broadway in 2007. Her public Montgomery Fellow lecture, “An Afternoon with Joan Didion,” will be presented Tuesday, October 7 at 4:30 p.m. in Filene Auditorium (Moore Hall).

John Abizaid, retired general and former commander of the United States Central Command, which includes much of the Middle East, will be at Dartmouth October 13 through 16. His public Montgomery Fellow lecture will be presented Tuesday, October 14, at 4:30 p.m. in Filene Auditorium (Moore Hall).

John Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has headed several news bureaus for The New York Times, including his current posting as London bureau chief, will be at Dartmouth October 20 through 31. His public Montgomery Fellow lecture, “Five Years in Iraq: Which Way Home?” will be presented Tuesday, October 21 at 4:30 p.m. in Filene Auditorium (Moore Hall).

Established in 1977 through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth F. Montgomery ’25, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment was created “to provide for the advancement of the academic realm of the College in ways that will significantly add to the quality and character thereof, making possible major new dimensions for, as well as extraordinary enrichments to, the educational experience offered primarily to undergraduate students within the Dartmouth community.”

By KELLY SEAMAN

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