Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor inthe Humanities: Professor of English. She also serves as Director of Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and is a member of the associated faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology. A poet and critic, she teaches the history of poetry, poetics, and issues in aesthetics. She is the author of The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making,(University of Chicago Press); Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, (which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004); and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art. Her most recent books of poetry are Red Rover, which appeared in 2012 in Italian translation from Jaca Books, Milan; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. Her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, appeared in 2009 with Princeton University Press and two co-translations with the University of Chicago Press: with Sara Teardo, Laudornia Bonanni’s novel, “The Reprisal”; and, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, the most recent two books of poetry by Milo DeAngelis “Theme of Farewell and After-Poems”. She also has translated Euripides’ Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Her song cycle, “Songs for Adam,” commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009.
A former MacArthur Fellow, Professor Stewart recently served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and in the Spring of 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Reception to follow in the Comparative Literature Library