Speaker Bios

FOR THE SEPTEMBER 24 BOOK LAUNCH EVENT CELEBRATING

Creating Waldens: An East-West Conversation on the American Renaissance

Ronald A. Bosco is Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature and Distinguished Service Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he has taught since 1975. An editor of the Emerson Family Papers at the Houghton Library of Harvard University since 1977, he edited volumes in the The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (1982), The Complete Sermons (1991), and The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993) series; he is currently General Editor of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson series published by Harvard University Press. In 2003, he and JOEL MYERSON co-chaired the bicentennial celebrations of Emerson’s birth sponsored by the Emerson family, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and Massachusetts Historical Society, among others; they also curated Emerson in 2003, the official bicentennial exhibition at Harvard. On 25 May 2003, Emerson’s two-hundredth birthday, Bosco delivered the commemorative address to the Emerson family and the Town of Concord at Emerson’s home in Concord. A specialist in American intellectual and literary history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, and the theory and practice of textual and documentary editing, Professor Bosco has published some thirty books that range from editions of previously unpublished manuscripts to critical and biographical studies. Professor Bosco has served as the president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, Thoreau Society, and Association for Documentary Editing.

Joel Myerson is Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He has published some seventy books dealing with the American Romantic period of 1830-1860, including works on Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Myerson's Emerson books include the standard bibliographies of writings by and about him.  Myerson and RONALD A. BOSCO recently published The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2005) and The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (2005). He has held short-term Fulbright lectureships in Japan in 2002 and in New Zealand in 2005.  Myerson has served as president of the Association for Documentary Editing, Louisa May Alcott Society, Thoreau Society, and Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.

Anita Patterson is Associate Professor of English at Boston University.  She is author of From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and is currently writing a book about modernism and Japonisme in the Americas.

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