Thank you very much for all those who attended and participated in the Reynolds Price Jubilee. It was an outstanding event and a wonderful tribute for Reynolds.

Please feel free to download photos, audio, and video from the event using the links to your right.

A good teacher is a rare find. Duke attracts fine students and teachers, but how often do you hear of someone teaching anywhere for fifty years?

In 2008, Reynolds Price will have taught at Duke University for fifty years. Countless students and members of the university community have experienced his brilliance, humor, and erudition. In fact, he has been a part of the life of Duke for approximately two-thirds of the institution's existence.

His affection for this place, his love of learning, his eagerness to share his many interests make any time spent in his presence remarkable.

This jubilee showcases a small sampling of how his influence has permeated and penetrated Duke. There will be video presentations, performances, interviews, panels, readings, and many moments to relish the impact of one of Duke's best-known teachers. Come and expect to be enthralled.

A great teacher has the ability to enthuse students, open new worlds, and create possibilities previously inconceivable. He or she must be able to listen, explain, cajole, and encourage. As our honoree has said, "This is a daunting profession."

In addition to his teaching, Price has found the time to write thirty-seven volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, essays, and plays - all to growing international acclaim.

A native of North Carolina and a 1955 graduate of Duke, Price was among our early Rhodes Scholars, allowing him to study in Oxford, England, with W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil (among others). On his return to the U.S. in 1958, he began his illustrious teaching career at Duke. Now five decades later, we honor him among Duke's best and brightest.

Speakers and Participants

Ian Baucom
Baucom, professor and chair of the English department at Duke, works on twentieth-century British literature and culture, postcolonial and cultural studies, and African and black Atlantic literatures. He is author of numerous books and has edited special issues of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Atlantic Studies and Romanticism. He is currently working on a new book tentatively titled The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life.

Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish is the Davidson Kahn Distinguished University Professor and professor of law at Florida International University in Miami. He has also taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University, where he chaired the English department from 1986 to 1992. He is the author of ten books.

Richard Ford
Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Mississippi, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. His latest novel is The Lay of the Land, which ends the Frank Bascombe series. He has edited the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of Eudora Welty and is Welty's designated literary executor.

Annabeth Gish
Annabeth Gish '93 majored in English and minored in women's studies at Duke, graduating cum laude. As a teenager, she appeared in the films Desert Bloom and Mystic Pizza. Her television roles include special agent Monica Reyes in two seasons of the X-Files, President Barlet's daughter Elizabeth on The West Wing, the role of Eileen Caffee on the Showtime series Brotherhood, and guest appearances on CSI: Miami and Chicago Hope.

Charles Guggenheim
Charles Guggenheim (1924-2002) was an internationally acclaimed documentary film maker. He made more than 100 documentaries and was nominated for twelve Academy Awards; he won four. He is considered a central figure in the American documentary field. His documentary Clear Pictures, based on Reynolds Price's book of the same name, was one of his Academy Award nominations.

Ellen Hemphill
Hemphill, a member of Duke's theater studies department since 1992, is artistic director of the theater company Achipelago in Chapel Hill, where she directs and performs. At Duke, she has directed The Crucible and The Trojan Women. For the American Dance Festival, she teaches voice and gesture. An actor and playwright, she is currently working on a new piece, Axial Moments.

Josephine Humphreys
Josephine Humphreys '67, an honors graduate, is the award-winning author of four novels, including her latest, Nowhere Else on Earth. She received an honorary degree from Duke, and her papers are in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library here.

Bo King
King '94 is a staff attorney for the capital habeas unit of the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan before earning his law degree at New York University. He was Reynolds Price's assistant in 1994-1995.

Melissa Malouf
Malouf is an associate professor of the practice of English, director of the Office of Undergraduate Scholars and Fellows, and director of the Arts in Contemporary Society FOCUS program at Duke. She is the author of the novel It Had To Be You, a short-story collection No Guarantees, three one-act plays, and two opera libretti.

Suzanne Marrs
Marrs is professor of English and Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at Millsaps College. She has lectured on Eudora Welty's works in the U.S., Russia, and France and is the author of One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Her most recent book is Eudora Welty, A Biography, written with Welty's permission.

George McLendon
McLendon, dean of the faculty for Arts and Sciences and Trinity College at Duke since 2004, is a professor in the chemistry department. He was a National Science Foundation Fellow, an A.P. Sloan Research Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1990, he won the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1989, she was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she currently teaches. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal in 2000. A former editor at Random House, she has written, in addition to her novels, six books for children with her son, Slade, as well as several works of nonfiction.

Deborah Pope
Pope, a professor in Duke's English department, is a poet and the author of the poetry collections Fanatic Heart, Mortal World, and Falling Out of the Sky. She has also published A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women's Poetry and Ties That Bind: Essay on Mothering and Patriarchy.

Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose '64, J.D. '68 is the Emmy Award-winning host of The Charlie Rose Show on the Public Broadcasting System. Born in Henderson, North Carolina, Rose has maintained ties with his alma mater while advancing his television career at the BBC, CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg.

James Schiff
James Schiff '81 is associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His master's degree and doctorate are from New York University. He is the author or editor of five books on contemporary American fiction, including Understanding Reynolds Price and Updike in Cincinnati.

Victor Strandberg
Victor Strandberg is a professor of English at Duke, where he has taught since 1966. He received his Ph.D. in American literature from Brown University. In 1988, he spoke on "Christian Hedonism in [Reynolds Price's] Kate Vaiden" at a conference on Christianity and literature. He has had Fulbright appointments at the universities of Uppsala, Lovain, Mannheim, and Cadi Ayyad.

Jane Tompkins
Jane Tompkins received her Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Duke, and Temple University. She wrote Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1869, published in 1985. Her best-known work is A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, which incorporates her current beliefs that education involves the whole person--mind, body, and spirit.

Jonathan Uslaner
Jonathan Uslaner '01 earned his law degree at the University of Texas and is currently a litigator at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates in Los Angeles. He was Reynolds Price's assistant in 2001-02.

Daniel Voll
Daniel Voll '83 is an executive producer and writer on the CBS primetime series, The Unit, created by David Mamet. He has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine. He has reported from South Africa and Bosnia for Esquire, where he is a contributing editor, and his fiction has appeared in Story and other literary journals. Voll produced the HBO documentary, Army of God, and he was a consulting producer on Shut Up & Sing, which was directed by his wife, Cecilia Peck.

Wilson O. "Wil" Weldon III
Wilson O. "Wil" Weldon III '96 studied English literature and film at Duke before spending a year as Reynolds Price's assistant and completing his first documentary, Bread on the Waters, in 1997. A video journalist, he earned his master's in journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill in May and recently finished a film, My Brother A Muslim.

Sam Wells
Sam Wells is dean of Duke Chapel and research professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School. He grew up in England and graduated from Merton College, Oxford, with a master's in modern history. He earned his B.D. in systematic theology at Edinburgh University and his Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Durham University. His latest book is Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection.

Perkins Library Exhibit
"Reynolds Price: A Long and Happy Life"
January 15 - March 1, 2008

This special exhibit honoring Reynolds Price will have two parts. Six two-sided panels on display outside the von der Heyden Pavilion will focus on various aspects of his life and career - his family, home and colleagues, scholarship, writing in various formats, life at Duke, and survival of cancer. An audio installation will also be available for listening to some of his NPR commentaries.

The other part of the exhibit will be original manuscripts and printed works from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and Price's papers, focusing on his writing process and development as an author. These will be on display in the cases outside the Biddle Rare Book Room.

Questions?

Call Rachel Davies, director of Alumni Education and Travel, at Duke Alumni Affairs (919) 684-5114, (919) 681-6216 or rachel.davies@daa.duke.edu

*Artwork reprinted by permission of the author.
*Program and schedule subject to change.