Ellen McCulloch-Lovell
In her tenth year as president of Marlboro College, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is its first woman leader. Her book of poems, Gone, was published in 2010 by Janus Press and she earned her MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2012. Ellen began her career in Vermont as the executive director of the Vermont Arts Council, then spent decades in Washington DC as Senator Leahy’s Chief of Staff, director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Deputy Assistant to President Clinton and Advisor to the First Lady, and as founding director of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.
At Marlboro and nationally, Ellen has focused on making the case for the value of a liberal arts education and for the civic mission of college. With her leadership, the college has gained financial strength and greater national recognition. She also serves as Chair of the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges and of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She helped to write the 2011 Report of the Council on the Future of Vermont and recently was invited to join the State’s Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy advisory committee. She lives with her husband Christopher in the Captain Dan Mather House on Marlboro’s undergraduate campus.
Janet Montefiore (Director of the Symposium)
Janet Montefiore, who is married to the war reporter Patrick Cockburn, is Professor of 20th century English Literature at Kent University, where she has taught since 1978. Her long-standing interest in Rudyard Kipling’s work is reflected in her recent publications. Her books include Feminism and Poetry (1987, 2004), Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), Rudyard Kipling (2007), an edition of Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling for Penguin Classics (2011) and most recently the edited collection In Time’s Eye: essays on Rudyard Kipling (Manchester University Press, forthcoming, November 2013). She is General Editor of Kipling titles for Penguin Classics, has directed conferences on Kipling’s work in 2007 (Canterbury) and 2011 (London), and now edits the Kipling Journal. She has been Vice-Chairman of the Council of the Kipling Society.
Thomas Pinney
Thomas Pinney is Professor of English Emeritus at Pomona College California, and one of the world’s leading Kipling Scholars. He has contributed two massive works to Kipling studies, as Editor of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, published by Macmillan is six volumes between 1990 and 2004, and of the three volume Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling, published in 2013, the most complete edition of the verse yet published. He has also contributed a number of smaller works and articles on the subject over the years. He is a Vice-President of the Kipling Society.
Daniel Karlin is the Winterstoke Professor of English at the University of Bristol. After a first degree and PhD at Cambridge he has held teaching posts in University College London, Boston University, and the University of Sheffield. His primary field of research is Victorian poetry, especially the work of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Other strong interests include nineteenth-century American literature, and the work of Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, and Bob Dylan. He has written extensively about Kipling, and has edited The Jungle Books for Penguin Classics in 1987, and a major selection of Kipling’s poetry and prose for Oxford University Press in 1999.
U. C. Knoepflmacher
U. C. Knoepflmacher, the Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, has published and edited numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, as well as British and American children’s literature. His writings on Kipling include: “Female Power and Male Self-Assertion: Kipling and the Maternal” (1992), “Kipling’s Just-So Partner: The Dead Child as Collaborator and Muse” (1997), “Validating Defiance: from Heinrich Hoffmann to Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Maurice Sendak” (2000), “The Chameleon Kipling: His Rise, Fall, and Rehabilitation” (2001), “Kipling’s ‘Mixy’ Creatures” (2008), “Kipling as Browning: from Parody to Translation” (2012). He is currently finishing a memoir, ORURO: A BOY’S HOLOCAUST REFUGE IN THE ANDES.
Thomas Ragle
Thomas Ragle took an A.B. in Ancient Greek History and Literature at Harvard University and a B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature at Oxford University. He later served as President of Marlboro College (1958-81) and was instrumental in the creation of the College’s distinguished Kipling collection. He has been Director of the Salzburg Seminar (1983-89), and Special Consultant to the United Nations Development Program in Beijing, China, on the teaching of English literature at the university level (1989-91). He also served two years each as a visiting professor and Special Assistant to the President at the University of Vermont and Trinity College (Vermont). Since retiring in 1993 he and his wife Nancy have lived in Guilford, Vermont in the home in which Nancy grew up. “Calling himself ‘an amateur of poetry’, he publishes under the pen name Lee Bramble.
Judith Plotz
Judith Plotz was educated at Radcliffe College, Girton College Cambridge, (on a Marshall Scholarship), and Harvard University. Recently retired as a Professor Emerita from George Washington University, she is a scholar of British Romanticism, Children’s Literature, and Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. In addition to her books and articles on Romanticism, (especially Romanticism and Childhood), she has a dedicated interest in Kipling. Besides various articles published over the past twenty years, she has edited the Penguin Just S o Stories and is completing a book on Kipling as a children’s writer. In addition she is writing a series of articles for the South Asian Review on Kipling’s colonial literary contemporaries; the first was on A.C Lyall (A.C. Lyall’s ‘High Roman Fashion’ and the End of British India”); the second will be on H.S. Cunningham’s Chronicles of Dustypore. She reviews regularly for SAR and Children’s Literature. She and her husband live for part of the year in Cabot, Vermont.
Tricia Lootens
Tricia Lootens, Associate Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, co-edited the Longman’s Cultural Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim with Paula M. Krebs. Lootens, who specializes primarily in Victorian poetry, has published on Kipling in connection to the Indo-Anglian poet Toru Dutt (2005), as well as Victorian patriotic writing (Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2000). The author of “Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity” (PMLA1994; rpt 1995, 1999), and Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (University Press of Virginia, 1996), she is now completing a book project tentatively entitled ‘”Haunted Spheres: Poetess Performance, Anti-Slavery Patriotism, and the Dream of National Innocence.”
David Alan Richards
David Alan Richards is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, and of Cambridge University, where he was a Keasbey Fellow in 1967-1969. His collection of Kipling books and manuscripts, the world’s largest, is now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, which mounted an exhibition of this collection in 2007 and published a full color illustrated catalogue, Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind. His Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography was published by Oak Knoll Press and the British Library in 2010, and has been nominated for the International League of Antiquarian Bookseller’s Breslauer Prize as one of the world’s best bibliographies in the last four years. Mr. Richards is a vice president of the Kipling Society, and has published several articles in its journal. He practices real estate law part time in New York City with the firm of Steptoe & Johnson, and is currently writing a history of Yale’s senior societies.
He has engaged the services of Josephine Balestier Dunham’s great granddaughter, Mary Dunham, to read some excerpts from her letters sent to her family during her stay in London with Rudyard and her brother Wolcott, as part of his presentation.
Charles Fish
Charles Fish grew up in Essex Junction, Vermont, in the 1940s and 50s along the lower reaches of the Winooski River. He has degrees from Northwestern University, Oxford, and Princeton, and has taught at Princeton, Windham College, and Western New England College. Other jobs have included college dean and real estate appraiser, and in his student years summer jobs as salmon fisher, plumber, store clerk, and farmhand. A lifelong scribbler, he now lives in Dummerston, Vermont, with his wife Eleanor. He has a particular interest in local history, and is active in the Dummerston Historical Society. His books include In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont’s Winooski River, Blue Ribbons and Burlesque: A Book of Country Fairs, and In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family Farm
Mary Hamer
Mary Hamer travels widely. She taught at Cambridge before becoming a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. Subjects she’s written on include Trollope’s working papers, the mapping of Ireland and the representation of Cleopatra in the West. Kipling and Trix, her fifth book and first novel, was awarded the Virginia Prize for Fiction.
John Radcliffe (Administrator for the Symposium)
John Radcliffe made his working career mainly in educational broadcasting for the BBC, where he spent five years as Head of the BBC Open University Production Centre. He has a life-long interest in Kipling, and for the Kipling Society has created and managed the Society’s website, and is the General Editor of the on line Readers’ Guide to Kipling’s works.
Kaori Nagai
Kaori Nagai teaches English Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Empire of Analogies, Kipling India and Ireland (Cork U. Press 2006), and the editor of Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and The Jungle Books for Penguin Classics.
Peter Havholm is Professor Emeritus at The College of Wooster in Ohio. His latest work is Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling’ Fiction (Ashgate 2008).
Roger Ayers
Roger Ayers is a former Membership Secretary, Member and Chairman of the Council of the Kipling Society, and is currently the President of the Society. He has a particular interest in archaeology and military history, and has annotated a number of the soldier tales and poems for the New Readers Guide.
John Carnahan
John Carnahan, a long-time resident of Brattleboro, where he has practised law for many years, has a particular interest in local history. He is a former President of the Brattleboro Historical Society and the Vermont Historical Society.
Leonee Ormond
Leonee Ormond, Professor Emerita of Victorian Studies at King’s College London, is Chairman of the Council of the Kipling Society. Her books include George Du Maurier (1969), Lord Leighton (with Richard Ormond (1975) and Alfred Tennyson: a Literary Life (1993).
[J.M./J.R.]