The Lyman Beecher Lectureship Series: Prof Hortense J. Spiller - Lecture II

Professor Hortense J. Spiller will deliver the 2025 lectures. Subject matter of each lecture to be announced in Fall 2025.

One of the most distinguished lecture series on preaching in the world, Yale Divinity School’s Lyman Beecher Lectureship was founded in 1871 by a gift from Henry W. Sage of Brooklyn, N.Y., as a memorial to “the great divine whose name it bears,” to sponsor an annual series of lectures on a topic appropriate to the work of the ministry.

Hortense Spillers, Professor Emerita, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, Distinguished Research Professor

Vanderbilt University

Hortense J. Spillers (born April 24, 1942) is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.

Spillers received her B.A. degree from University of Memphis in 1964, M.A. in 1966, and her Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University in 1974. She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. In 2013, she was the founding editor of the scholarly journal The A-Line Journal, A Journal of Progressive Commentary.