Food Conference Keynote Speaker

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Department of History

College of Liberal and Fine Arts

The University of Texas at San Antonio

announce the

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON

FOOD REPRESENTATION IN THE HUMANITIES, FILM AND THE ARTS

Keynote Speaker
Professor Steven G. Kellman
"The Only Fit Food for a Man is Half a Lemon": Kafka's Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations

Friday, February 26

6:30 pm Aula Canaria

University of Texas at San Antonio

Downtown Campus

With the support of an HEB grant

A professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 1976, Steven G. Kellman was UTSA’s first Ashbel Smith Professor (1995-2000). He has also taught at the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Irvine and at Bemidji State Minnesota and Tel-Aviv University. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in English and General Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Sofia and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Tbilisi State University and twice served as Partners of the Americas lecturer in Peru. He was twice awarded the UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Recognition of Research Excellence (1990-91, 2005-2006) and once received the campus-wide teaching award (1985-86). Kellman has served as John E. Sawyer fellow at Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute and has held an NEH research grant, an NEH grant to South Africa, and a Fulbright-Hays grant to China. He was honored with the 2005 Arts and Letters Award of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and with the 2008 Gemini Ink Literary Excellence Award.


Kellman is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was honored with the 2005 New York Society Library Award for Biography and was praised in the San Francisco Chronicle as "not only a necessary addition to the annals of American literature, but also a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art." Kellman's other books include The Translingual Imagination (2000), The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (1993), Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (1985), and The Self Begetting Novel (1980). He is editor or co editor of M. E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (2009), Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003), UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld (2002), Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2000), Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999), Into The Tunnel: Readings in Gass's Novel (1998), and Perspectives on Raging Bull (1994). Since 2001, he has co edited Magill's Literary Annual.

A contributing writer for The Texas Observer and the San Antonio Current, Kellman received the 1986 H. L. Mencken Award for his column in the San Antonio Light. He was awarded first place in arts criticism by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2006 and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction for an essay in the Southwest Review during 2008. He is currently serving his third term as a director of the National Book Critics Circle and was recipient of the NBCC's 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffingtonpost.com, Forward, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. Kellman was founding president of the literary center Gemini Ink and was elected into the Texas Institute of Letters.