In 1976, Edwin Sill Fussell '43 and Paul Fussell, Jr. '45 initiated a fund in honor of their teacher, Charles S. Holmes, who taught at Pomona College between 1941 and 1975. The Fussell brothers gave only the broadest of instructions for the use of this fund, leaving it up to the Department of English at Pomona College to decide how best “to further the encouragement of excellence and inspiration in undergraduate teaching.” Each year, since 1993, a member of the English Department has invited a scholar who has in some particular way inspired him or her as a teacher and scholar to come to campus and share their work with us.
The 26th Charles S. Holmes Memorial Lecture
Speaker - William E. Jones
Artist and writer William E. Jones will present material from True Homosexual Experiences, his biography of sexual outlaw Boyd McDonald, publisher of the queer proto-zine Straight to Hell.
William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. He has made the experimental films Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many other works, including the recent essay film, Fall into Ruin (2017), about the Greek art dealer Alexander Iolas (1907-1987) and his abandoned house in Athens.
Jones’s films have been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London (2005); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010); Austrian Film Museum, Vienna (2011); and Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2011). He participated in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the 2009 Venice Biennale, and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. He has been exhibited at Musée du Louvre, Palais de Tokyo, and Cinémathèque française, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; St. Louis Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
William E. Jones has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), Imitation of Christ (2013), Flesh and the Cosmos (2014), and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). His writing has appeared in Animal Shelter, Area Sneaks, Artforum, Bidoun, Butt, Frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, and The White Review.
Jones has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Grant, two California Community Foundation Fellowships, and a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
4:15 PM
Ena Thompson Reading Room (Crookshank 108)
Past Holmes Lecturers
| Year | Lecturer |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Harry Berger, UC Santa Cruz |
| 1994 | John Alford, Michigan State University |
| 1995 | Sara Suleri Goodyear, Yale University |
| 1996 | Christopher Ricks, Boston University |
| 1997 | Stephen Greenblatt, University of California Berkeley |
| 1998 | Wayne C. Booth, University of Chicago |
| 1999 | Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University |
| 2000 | Louis Menand, City University of New York |
| 2001 | Joyce Ann Joyce, Temple University |
| 2002 | Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta at Edmonton |
| 2003 | D.A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley |
| 2004 | David Bevington, University of Chicago |
| 2005 | Susan Stewart, Princeton University |
| 2006 | Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 2007 | Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan |
| 2008 | Mark Hansen, University of Chicago |
| 2009 | Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania |
| 2010 | Lawrence Buell, Harvard University |
| 2011 | Deidre Shauna Lynch, University of Toronto |
| 2012 | Sianne Ngai, Stanford University |
| 2013 | Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago |
| 2014 | (Spring) Anne Anlin Cheng, Princeton University |
| 2015 | Enda Duffy, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 2016 | Charles Baxter, Professor of English, University of Minnesota |
| 2017 |
Jacqueline T. Miller, Rutgers University
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