Shields to Present Distinguished Professorship Lecture April 28

Distinguished Professor of English John C. Shields will present the Distinguished Professorship Lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, April 28, in the Prairie room of Bone Student Center.  Admission is free and open to the public.

The title of Shields’ lecture, “Notes toward a Thirty-one Year Love Affair,” refers to his discovery of 18th-century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley during his doctoral studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.  Shields asked to teach the English department’s African American literature course (in order to avoid teaching a freshman composition class).  The first author on the standard syllabus was Wheatley, a slave in Boston, Mass., and the first published African-American poet and a woman considered to be the founder of African-American literature. 

"It is no exaggeration to observe that my career has, from that moment," Shields said, "largely been devoted to redirecting attention away from the phenomenon of her condition as a slave toward a fair and balanced consideration of her texts. Thorough investigation of her texts has ascertained, right readily, that she must be understood as a serious artist who has created texts which manifest multiple levels of possible critical interpretations. She is, therefore, not a derivative imitator as she has nauseatingly been called, but a superior, even at times revolutionary, artist of the first rank."

A reception will immediately follow Shields' lecture.                                                                                                                                                                                 

Shields joined Illinois State’s English faculty in 1979, after receiving his Ph.D. in English, and since then has published more than 100 articles and books, served on three national literary boards (for The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, the 24-volume American National Biography and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry and Poets), and received four NEH Fellowships, an NEH Conference Grant and a fellowship in Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, among others.

Shield’s 2001 publication of “The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self” garnered two national awards.  It is this book which functions as the primary motivation for his newly formed Center for Classicism in American Culture. His “Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts” is slated to appear this coming June.