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Stanford Professor to Give Shannon-Clark Lecture at W&L

Blakey Vermeule, professor of English at Stanford University and American scholar of 18th-century British literature and theory of mind, will give the Shannon-Clark Lecture at Washington and Lee on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 8 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

The title of her talk, which is free and open to the public, is “Some Belated Peasant: Notes on the Lateness of Consciousness.”

Vermeule has been a member of the faculty at Stanford since 2005. She is the author of “The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in 18th-Century Britain” (2000) and “Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?” (2009), both from The Johns Hopkins University Press. She is currently writing a book about what science has discovered about the unconscious.

Her articles have appeared in “Critical Inquiry,” “Modern Language Quarterly,” “Modern Philology,” “Philosophy and Literature,” “Poetics Today,” “Qui Parle,” “Style,” and several edited collections on cognitive literary studies.

Her research interests are neuroaesthetics, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to art, philosophy and literature, British literature from 1660-1820, post-Colonial fiction, satire, and the history of the novel.

Vermeule received her B.A. in English from Yale University and her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley.