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$1.5M to benefit Editorial Institute
Mellon Foundation honors Ricks for contributions to the humanities
By David J. Craig
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Christopher Ricks with Core Curriculum students Laura Jane Swan (CAS'03) and Abe Friedman (CAS'03). Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks was recognized recently for his achievements as a writer, editor, and teacher with his selection by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to receive its Distinguished Achievement Award. The prestigious award for humanities professors, for which scholars do not apply but are nominated by their peers, carries a three-year grant of approximately $1.5 million.
Ricks, BU's William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, a Core Curriculum professor, and codirector of the University's Editorial Institute, plans to use the grant to compile and edit the works of Victorian legal thinker James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94). The grant also will support educational programs at the institute, which is a graduate training program in literary editing that offers courses on subjects such as annotation and the history of the book.
Unlike awards that benefit individual scholars exclusively, the Mellon grant is given officially to its recipient's institution to support teaching as well as research activities. Ricks and BU administrators have presented a project proposal to the New York–based Mellon Foundation and expect the grant period to begin this fall.
Considered one of the most important critics of English language poetry, Ricks has written influential interpretations of John Milton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Keats, and T. S. Eliot, as well as Samuel Beckett and even Bob Dylan. His critical writings, which include Allusion to the Poets, Essays in Appreciation, Beckett's Dying Words, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, and Keats and Embarrassment, are known for their wide range of literary reference and for spanning centuries and genres. A celebrated editor of poetic texts as well, Ricks has edited the work of Tennyson, Robert Browning, A. E. Housman, and James Henry. He has taught at BU since 1986.
“A humanistic scholar of international standing, Professor Ricks has trained generations of students and, through his generous mentoring of younger scholars, his influence has reached even further. . . .” says Harriet Zuckerman, the Mellon Foundation's senior vice president. “As a writer, editor, and teacher, Professor Ricks embodies the central importance of direct encounter with language in its most artful arrangements.”
Also receiving a Distinguished Achievement Award with Ricks were Columbia historian Roger Bagnall, University of Pittsburgh philosopher Robert Brandom, and Princeton historian Anthony Grafton.
Ricks says the award came at a perfect time, as he had recently stepped up his effort to find funding for a massive project collecting the works of James Fitzjames Stephen, an English judge, essayist, and social commentator. Stephen's writing on such fundamental legal matters as capital punishment, insanity and criminal responsibility, and the law of evidence were profoundly influential, Ricks says, but are underappreciated today. He expects the several-volume collection to include a modern edition of Stephen's History of Criminal Law of England, an 1883 treatise Ricks considers “an un-superseded work,” and his Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, a controversial critique of John Stuart Mill first published in 1863 and the only one of Stephen's books currently in print. The volumes also will include Stephen's articles on writers such as Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, and Honoré de Balzac.
“Stephen was an unusually strong-minded and fair-minded thinker, and he wrote about questions that the law continues to come back to and which never will cease to be of interest,” says Ricks. “He was quite brilliant in thinking about what constitutes legal exceptions,” such as “why certain evidence is inadmissible in court. . . . I think the volumes will be of interest to anybody interested in the development of the law.”
In addition, Ricks says, Stephen's writing on literature — for instance, his “profound distrust” of historical novelists, who he believed often unethically distorted the historical record —“is very interesting and important for literary and cultural studies.”
The $1.5 million grant is expected to support the effort of Archie Burnett, a CAS Core Curriculum professor and codirector of the Editorial Institute with Ricks and UNI Professor Geoffrey Hill, to edit the collected poems of Philip Larkin. The grant will fund postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and graduate students to work on the Larkin and Stephen projects, and will allow Ricks, Burnett, and others to travel to conduct research. Also as part of the grant, Ricks plans to organize a conference on Stephen and to take a sabbatical leave for two of the next six semesters. He says the Stephen project will involve researchers from LAW, the CAS history department, and other universities.
Ricks says the Mellon Foundation's spotlighting of his career is “very heartening,” especially because the wide scope of his work goes against the contemporary intellectual trend toward specialization. “You sometimes feel in academic life that unless you specialize very intensely, you won't get recognized as having made a signal contribution, and I've tried my hand at many different things,” he says. Ricks' most recent book is a close reading of Bob Dylan's lyrics (Dylan's Visions of Sin, Penguin UK, 2003). “The award also is particularly good for BU, because the Mellon Foundation doesn't give the award to institutions that will not profit in the best possible way from the grant. The humanities have been very strongly supported at BU, and that makes this award very gratifying.”
16
January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations