Feature Speakers

 

Edward Alston Cecil Baugh                         

EDWARD BAUGH, Professor Emeritus of English at the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies was born in 1936, in Port Antonio, the capital of the northeastern Jamaican parish of Portland. After completing his secondary education at Titchfield High School, he won a Jamaican Government Exhibition to the University College of the West Indies to do his B.A in English. He subsequently won a R.S. McLaughlin Fellowship to do postgraduate studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, and a Commonwealth Scholarship to the University of Manchester where he obtained a Ph.D in English, in 1964.

 

Prof. Baugh taught at the Cave Hill campus of The University of the West for three years (1965-1967) and at the Mona campus for over thirty-three years (1968-2001). He became Professor of English at The University of the West Indies, Mona in 1978, and he has held visiting appointments at The University of California, Los Angeles, Dalhousie University, University of Hull, University of Wollongong, Flinders University, Macquarie University, University of Miami, and Howard University.

 

His publications include West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation (1971), Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978), Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), A Tale from the Rainforest (1988), and It Was the Singing (2000). His most recent publication is an annotated scholarly edition of Derek Walcott’s Another Life (2004) with Colbert Nepaulsingh. He is currently working on a biography of Frank Collymore, and a monograph on Derek Walcott for the Cambridge University Press series on African and Caribbean writers.

 

Edward Baugh has garnered an international reputation as an authority on Anglophone Caribbean poetry in general, and on the work of Derek Walcott in particular. A critically acclaimed poet himself, Baugh brings a poet’s sensibility to his critical writings, which are characterized by elegant clarity of expression and insightful close readings that pay attention to the intricacies of a writer’s craft, the subtleties and vicissitudes of form and language while cognizant of the social, cultural, and historical contexts that inform literary texts. Prof. Baugh’s  work on Frank Collymore, Derek Walcott, and Lorna Goodison has also established critical benchmarks for the study of these writers, fulfilling his own criteria of good criticism by making “telling statements on particular books by way of thought-provoking observations on general principles” ("Towards a West Indian Criticism").

 

Prof. Baugh will deliver the Keynote Address at the opening ceremony of the Walcott Conference.

 

 

Gordon Rohlehr

GORDON ROHLEHR , Professor Emeritus at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine graduated in 1964 from the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, with a First Class Honours degree in English Literature. He went on to obtain his doctorate from Birmingham University, England (1964-1967).

 

Prof. Rohlehr specializes in West Indian literature and oral poetry expressed through his socio-historical interest in Trinidad as well as the calypso and popular culture in the Caribbean. He has pioneered the academic and intellectual study of Calypso, tracing its history over several centuries. Through extensive research he has documented the movements of one genre to another and the passage of calypso through the ages.

 

Between 1968 and 2004, he has written extensively on West Indian Literature, Oral Poetry, the calypso and popular culture in the Caribbean. He has held numerous interviews, prepared and participated in various radio and television programmes, and lectured throughout the Caribbean, US, Canada, and the UK. He has been visiting Professor to Harvard (Sept-Dec 1981); the Johns Hopkins University (Sept-Dec 1985); Tulane University (Jan-May 1997); Stephen F. Austin State University (Jan-May 2000); Miami University Writers' Workshop (June-July 1995);  York University Toronto (January-Feb 1996) and Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (June-August, 2004).

 

Prof. Rohlehr has been the recipient of The University of the West Indies' Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in the combined fields of Teaching, Research, Administration and Public Service (1995).

 

His works include Pathfinder: Black Awakening in the Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr  1981); Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr 1989); My Strangled City and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad 1992); The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad 1992); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Lexicon Trinidad Ltd. 2004). He is also co-editor of Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean (Longman 1989).

 

 

 

 

Jean Antoine-Dunne

JEAN ANTOINE-DUNNE is Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine where she teaches West Indian Literature and Modernism. She is a graduate of UWI, St Augustine where she was awarded a postgraduate scholarship.  She completed her Masters at Maynooth College in Ireland and obtained her doctorate from University College Dublin where she also completed a higher diploma in European Human Rights Law with distinction. She was one of University College Dublin’s prestigious Newman Scholars between 1997 and 2000.

 

 She is the designer of the first Degree Programme in Film in the Anglophone Caribbean (2006) and was its first coordinator at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.

 

She has written and lectured extensively on the interface between film and literature and is co-editor of the innovative work The Montage Principle: Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts.

 

Dr Antoine-Dunne is also a painter, journalist and prolific critic. She was one of a number of academics and human rights activists who contributed to Ireland’s first multicultural newspaper, Metro Eireann, and devoted much of her time in Ireland to fighting for the rights of the intellectually disabled and for the protection of the environment.

 

 She is currently working on a film on Derek Walcott, part of a series of films she has already begun producing on Caribbean artists and intellectuals.