April 3, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Literary theorist Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at the Florida International University College of Law, will speak on “Is It Good for the Jews: Liberalism, Identity and Political Choice ” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, in the Cole Assembly Room (Red Room) in Converse Hall at Amherst College. Sponsored by Re-Think, the Office of the President, the English Department and the Willis Wood Fund at Amherst College, Fish’s talk is free and open to the public.

One of America’s leading public intellectuals, Fish is a prolific author whose works include more than 200 scholarly publications and books, in addition to essays in such popular press as The New York Times and Harper’s and frequent appearances in the mass media. His books include John Skelton’s Poetry (1965), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967, new edition 1997), Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972), The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (1978), Is there a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (1980), Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994), Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995), The Trouble with Principle (1999) and How Milton Works (2001). The Stanley Fish Reader, edited by H. Aram Veeser, was published in 1999. Fish has also had five books written about his books.

Fish served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University and Duke University, and served as director of the Duke University Press. Fish was a visiting professor at The John Marshall Law School from 2000 through 2002.

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