Una’s Lectures

Mary Louise Pratt, Una’s Lecturer 2003-2004

“English Only vs. National Security: Language and Contemporary Geopolitics” || March 15, 2004

Mary Louise Pratt recently joined the faculty at New York University, where she was named Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. At NYU she is also affiliated with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and with the Department of Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU, she was Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University from 1976 to 2003.

Pratt is most known as a scholar of Latin American literature since 1800; her research and teaching areas including postcolonial criticism and theory, cultural studies, women and print culture, literary discourse and ideology, travel literature, and modern prose fiction. Her published work includes Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980), and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). With the Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America, a group that included several Berkeley faculty, Professor Pratt co-authored Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America (1990).

The author of numerous essays and reviews on topics that range from verb forms in the African Kikuyu language, through ideology and speech-act theory, to new visions in culture and citizenship and the “traffic in meaning,” Pratt has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. From 1993 to 1996 she held the Bing Fellowship for Distinguished Teaching, Humanities and Sciences, at Stanford University. She also served as president of the Modern Language Association for 2003.

Other Events with Mary Louise Pratt

Follow-up Panel Discussion || March 16, 2004

with Pratt, Claire Kramsch (Berkeley Language Center), Bharati Mukherjee (Department of English), Geoffrey Nunberg (Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University), and José Davíd Saldívar, (Departments of English and Ethnic Studies).

“Vital Signs: The Work of Humanistic Inquiry Today” || March 17, 2004

A roundtable with Mary Louise Pratt and Berkeley faculty.