William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University
Paul H. Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English and has taught at Yale since 1971. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard. His primary areas of specialization are British romanticism, the history of literary criticism, contemporary literary theory, and literature in relation to the visual arts. His book, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode received the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society in America. Subsequent books are: William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice, A Defense of Poetry: Essays on the Occasion of Writing, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, and Theory of Literature. He has also written numerous short essays on painting and exhibition reviews for ArtNews and an article on aesthetics in the Philoctetes Journal, a periodical for the study of the imagination sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the 2011 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teaching Award offered by the Kennedy Center for the Arts. He is executive co-chair of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its national counterpart, the Yale National Initiative, in which he has led summer seminars for many years. He began life as a painter and hopes to come full circle.