Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series

About The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series

The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series was established after the death, in 2009, of Dr. Naseeb Shaheen, who was a professor in the English Department at the University of Memphis for many years. Dr. Shaheen wrote extensively about early modern literature, chiefly Shakespeare. His books on biblical references in Shakespeare's plays (1999, 2002) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1976) remain the definitive work in this field. He also published a two-volume Pictorial History of Ramallah (Palestine) (1992, 2006). In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Shaheen was a noted philanthropist and collector of pre-King James English Bibles. The Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series is sponsored by the Department of English and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.

The Sixteenth Annual Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture

Fall 2025 Lecture Series

Dan Sinykin // Emory University

It Is Difficult to Get the News From Poems: Close Reading and Artificial Intelligence
Thursday, September 25th, 2025 // Maxine Smith University Center River Room (UC 300)
Reception: 5:30pm // Lecture: 6:00pm
This event is jointly sponsored by the Department of English and the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities

The modernist poet William Carlos Williams wrote that "men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found" in poetry. What, exactly, did he mean by that? To find out, we must close read the text. Close reading treats text as art, not as content, or information, or as a set of facts to learn for some other purpose. We study art because it is good to study art: it keeps us from dying miserably. Now, AI is coming for the work we do in the humanities. It matters more than ever to understand why close reading is worth doing, why we should want to be intrinsically motivated to do it, as AI produces more of the world's writing and supplants thought with probabilistic prediction.

Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English. He is the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia, 2023), and, with Johanna Winant, is the editor of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2025).

Past Shaheen Lecturers

10/24/2024	Ayesha Hardison, University of Indiana, Bloomington "Some Notes on the Literature of the Civil Rights Movement: Maya Angelou's Reconsideration of History"
4/12/2024	Marjorie Garber, Harvard University "After 'After the Humanities'"
10/13/2022	Emily Lordi, Vanderbilt University "Bringing it Home: Whitney Houston's Black Creative Vision and Agency"
10/6/2022	Florence Dore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Modernism, Music, Memphis"
11/18/2021	Rob Nixon, Princeton University "Slow Violence and Environmental Justice in 2021"
10/3/2019	Stephanie Burt, Harvard University "Shipping Containers"
10/4/18	Hannibal Hamlin, Professor of English, Ohio State University "Seven Types of Allusion: Texts Talking with Texts from Shakespeare to the Present"
11/2/17	Yolanda Pierce, Professor and Dean, Howard University School of Divinity "I have shaken rivers out of my eyes: Black Poetry and Prophetic Rage"
10/20/16	William J. Maxwell, Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis "Born-Again, Seen-Again James Baldwin: State Surveillance, Afro-Pessimism, and the Literary History of Black Lives Matter."
10/22/15	Nicholas Watson, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Harvard University "The Word of God in the Mother Tongue, or Why most of what we assume about the history of Bible translation is wrong."
10/2/14	Paul Stevens, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Toronto "Churchill's War Horse: Children's Literature and the Pleasures of War"
11/21/13	Achsah Guibbory, Ann Whitney Olin Prof. of English, Barnard College "British Israelism: Three Centuries of a Forgotten History"
10/18/12	Katherine Bassard, Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University "Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible"
11/10/11	Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew Language and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley "The King James Bible and the Question of Eloquence"
9/21/10	Debora Shuger, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA "The Girls of Little Gidding: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Radical Feminism"

PAST SHAHEEN SYMPOSIA

10/26/17 "Conversations Across Concentrations"

10/14/16 "Reading Resistance: Bodies, Lessons, Movements"
10/16/15 "Keepin' it Real: The Languages of Authenticity"
9/26/14 "Producing Heroes"