CONWAY, Ark. (April 8, 2013) - Adam Phillips will be give the 2013 Robert and Lillian Drake Endowed Lecture on Thursday, April 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall.
His talk - entitled "My Happiness, Right or Wrong" -is free and open to the public.
Phillips works at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis and is known for his accessible and elegant prose style. A practicing psychoanalyst and active man of letters, Phillips has written many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1993); The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites (1998); Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (1999); Going Sane (2005); and, most recently, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2013).
He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books, as well as a contributor to Raritan and other journals. Most recently he was general editor for the new Penguin edition of Freud. He was for many years principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He now has a private practice in London. The novelist John Banville has called him "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our times." To the novelist Adam Mars-Jones, he is "the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness."
In addition to his talk, Phillips will be having lunch with interested students on Friday and will be interviewed at the Steel Center discussion series on Friday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. in Raney.
For more information, contact Dr. Dorian Stuber at 501-450-4569 or stuber@hendrix.edu.
Established in 2001 by Robert Y. Drake Jr. in memory of his parents, the Robert and Lillian Drake Endowed Lectureship series at Hendrix College funds an annual lecture. Professor Drake taught Southern Literature and creative writing at the University of Tennessee from 1965 until his retirement in 1999. His short stories about growing up in West Tennessee are familiar to a generation of Southern readers. While on sabbatical during the fall of 1982, Drake was a visiting professor at Hendrix and taught a popular course in "Recent Southern Fiction" to 43 students. During his stay at Hendrix, which was funded by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation, he also gave public readings and lectures for the Bertie Wilson Murphy Symposium in Literature and Language. The affinity he developed for Hendrix as a visiting professor inspired him to establish the lectureship in the English Department. In February 2004, Miller Williams, University Professor of English and Foreign Languages at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, gave the inaugural lecture.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country's "Up and Coming" liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country's best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu