Jahan Ramazani

University Professor and
Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English,
University of Virginia

Professor Ramazani is the author of numerous books of criticism, including Poetry in a Global Age (2020); Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2014); A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize for best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010; The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990).

He edited The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry; is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and The Norton Anthology of English Literature; and is an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics.

Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize, and the University of Virginia’s highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award.

After three years of virtual conferences, returning to the traditional model of conferencing is a risky venture. We wanted to invite a speaker with an international reputation who was already familiar with the Conference to help us reboot our in-person meetings.

Professor Ramazani was gracious enough to agree to be the opening speaker for our next 33 years of in-person conferences. When he last spoke at the BCPS Conference, in 2013, he was popular, provocative, and profound.