CONWAY, Ark. (July 6, 2016) – Hendrix College English professor
Dr. Alex Vernon will serve as conference director and program coordinator for
At Home in Hemingway’s World
, the 17th biennial international Hemingway Society conference at Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, later this month.
The conference, which is hosted by the
Hemingwa
y Society, the
Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and
Dominican University, will celebrate writer Ernest Hemingway’s 117th birthday with the largest gathering of scholars from all over the world. Among the more than 300 registrants are scholars from China, France, Japan, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, North
America, Serbia, Spain, and the U.K.
The program features more than 60 panel discussions and 170 presentations. The conference also offers continuing education credit for secondary school teachers, a story discussion group for veterans, and a one-day undergraduate symposium.
National Book Award-winning novelist Tim O'Brien will deliver a keynote talk, while director Lynn Novick, producer Sarah Botstein, and writer Geoffrey C. will discuss their creative process as they embark on a documentary of Hemingway co-directed by Ken Burns and Novick. The will air on PBS in 2020.
Hendrix alumna Anna Broadwell-Gulde ’13 will also make a presentation at the conference. She recently completed her master’s degree at the University of Chicago and will soon begin work on her doctorate in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Vernon is the author of Hemingway's Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War(University of Iowa Press, 2011). He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). He served as a tank lieutenant in the transitional Persian Gulf War (1990-1991). After completing
graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he joined the Department of English at Hendrix College in 2001.
Vernon volunteered to run the conference and used part of his fall 2015 sabbatical to plan the program.
“I've been attending Hemingway conferences since 1998, and I felt it was my turn to give back to the community that has given me so much,” he said. “I'm on the Hemingway Society Board, which also fed that sense of responsibility.”
“Like his modernist cohort, Hemingway came of age in the opening decades of the 20th century, when the world was changing and the American century was born,” he said. “There's something both absolutely bygone and fresh about reading his work.”
About
Hendrix College
Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. Founded in 1876 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884, Hendrix is featured in Colleges That Change
Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges and is nationally recognized in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings for academic quality, community, innovation, and value. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.