Keynote speakers & plenary panelists

Biographical Notes - Keynote Speakers

Luce Irigaray
One of the most celebrated contemporary Continental philosophers Luce Irigaray began her formation studying a Doctorate of Letters, doing a thesis on Paul Valery at the University of Louvain. She continued with training in psychology and in psychoanalysis in Paris. She received a Doctorate in Linguistics in 1968 and her Doctorate of State in Philosophy in 1974: Speculum, On the Other Woman, published by Editions de Minuit. Author of almost 20 books, translated into many languages, Irigaray's research on sexual difference moves across the disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, literature and religion.

The most recent publications translated into English are Between East and West: From Singularity to Community and The Way of Love. In the first of these books Luce Irigaray seeks through considering Indian philosophy to re-think Western individuality and community. In the second, just published, she tries to define a wisdom of love, a task too neglected by our Western philosophy which has claimed to only be a love of wisdom. For after Beckett d'apres Beckett, the Sydney Symposium Irigaray will be preparing a new work about the transcendance of the other in which she will propose an interpretation of the theme of waiting in Beckett and Coetzee.

Luce Irigaray has taught at the University of Vincennes, at the DAMS of Bologne and in diverse American University programs in Paris. She has held the Chair of Philosophy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam (1982). Since 1964, her most continuous work takes place in the Centre National de Recherché Scientifique, in Paris.

J.M.Coetzee
Internationally recognised as one of the finest contemporary novelists writing in English J.M. Coetzee has won the Booker prize twice: in 1983 for The Life and Times of Michael K and again in 1999 for Disgrace. Born in Capetown, South Africa Coetzee has written several novels concerning contemporary South African life before and after apartheid, and various collections of essays on literature and censorship. Foe (1986), and The Master of Petersburg (1994) – narratives that project the story behind Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Dostoyevsky's The Devils – reveal Coetzee's familiarity with and ability to enter into dialogue with great works of European literature. His other novels are Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Age of Iron (1990). His non-fiction works include White Writing: On the Culture of Letters (1988), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992), Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship (1996), Boyhood: A Memoir (1998), The Lives of Animals (1999), Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 (2001).

He wrote his PhD on Beckett and has spoken and written of his interest in Beckett. He is one the distinguished patrons of the Beckett International Foundation. He will be emigrating to Australia in late 2002.

Herbert Blau
Herbert Blau is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. He was co-founder and co-director of The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco (1952-65), and later co-director of the Repertory Theater of the Lincoln Center in New York (1965-68). His last extended work in the theatre was as the artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN (1968-81), the groundwork for which was prepared in the early seventies at California Institute of the Arts.

He has published numerous influential books on performance theory. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (1982) develops a theory of theater from his work with KRAKEN, and Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (1982) amplifies the theory. These two books received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and he has also received The Kenyon Review award for Literary Excellence. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (1987) explores the incursion of theatricality in and beyond the arts, in other forms of experience. The Audience (1990) is a further extension of what has become a sort of ontology of performance, while To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance (1992) asks – in a period with an ethos of suspicion – what is the future of illusion? Blau’s most recent books are Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (2000) and Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (1999). A collection of essays spanning a quarter of a century, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000 has just been published.

Biographical Notes - Plenary panelists (in alphabetical order)

H. Porter Abbott is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (1974), Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1986), Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (1996), and most recently The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002).  He is the editor of On the Origin of Fictions (2001), a special double issue of the journal Substance.  Among his essays and chapters are many on Samuel Beckett.  He has served as president of the Samuel Beckett Society, and is co-founder and currently sole proprietor of The Samuel Beckett Endpage.

Chris Ackerley is associate professor of English at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has written A Companion to Under the Volcano, A History of the Otago Bridge Club, and more recently Demented Particulars, the Annotated Murphy. His major research deals with the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. Current activities include the updating of his earlier Lowry Companion, and the co-editing of An Encyclopedia of Samuel Beckett.

Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor emerita in English and Theatre, Colorado State University, is now Senior Professor of Theatre at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She specializes in American drama, modern and contemporary British and European drama, and feminist drama and theatre. She was named Distinguished Professor at Colorado, was a Senior Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Newberry Library, Chicago; and was named Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University. She was the first woman president of the International Samuel Beckett Society, and is presently the convenor and Chair of the Beckett Working group, which meets every two years under the auspices of the International Federation of Theatre Research. She is Editor of Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, the Tel Aviv University English language theatre journal, and is on the Editorial boards of the Harold Pinter Review, Modern Drama, and Essays in Theatre. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary drama, particularly on the works of Beckett, Pinter, O¹Neill, and Glaspell. Her books include Samuel Beckett, Women in Beckett, Susan Glaspell, Theatre in Israel, and Writings from the Verge: The Life and Times of Susan Glaspell. She is presently co-editing the Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell; and editing The Road to the Temple, Glaspell¹s biography of George Cram Cook; and A Casebook on Glaspellis Trifles.

Mary Bryden is Professor in the School of European Studies, Cardiff University. She is also the President-Elect of the Samuel Beckett Society from 2003-2005. Until December 2002, she was Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies at the University of Reading, and Joint Director of the Beckett International Foundation. Her books include: Women in Samuel Beckett's prose and drama: her own other (Macmillan, 1993), Samuel Beckett and the idea of God (Macmillan, 1998), Samuel Beckett and music (Oxford University Press, 1998), Deleuze and religion (Routledge, 2001). She has just completed a monograph on Gilles Deleuze and Literature. Her research interests include literature in dialogue with the visual arts, music, and theology.

Bruno Clément est Professeur de Littérature française à l'Université Paris 8 (Vincennes à Saint-Denis) et Directeur de programme au Collège International de Philosophie. Il a soutenu sa thèse de Doctorat sur "Rhétorique et métaphysique dans l'oeuvre de Samuel Beckett" ; il est l'auteur de nombreux articles sur l'oeuvre de Samuel Beckett, dans Beckett today/Beckett aujourd'hui, ou dans Journal of Beckett Studies notamment. Il a publié en 1994 aux éditions du Seuil (collection Poétique, dirigée par G. Genette) un livre sur Beckett intitulé L'Œuvre sans qualités, préfacé par Michel Deguy, l'un des poètes majeurs de la poésie française contemporaine. Il a également publié des ouvrages qui portent sur la théorie de la lecture et du commentaire (Le lecteur et son modèle, PUF, 1999 ; L'Invention du commentaire --Augustin, Jacques Derrida, PUF, 2000). Ses travaux actuels portent sur les rapports entre littérature et philosophie.

Ruby Cohn is a renowned theatre scholar and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Drama at University of California, Davis. She is author or editor of many books, including The Comic Gamut (1962), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism (ed. 1962), Back to Beckett (1973), Casebook on Waiting for Godot (ed. 1987), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (1980), and most recently A Beckett Canon (2002).

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature >and Theory at Birkbeck College, London. He is author of Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (1988), Postmodernist Culture (1989), Theory and Cultural Value (1992) and Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), as well as books on Dickens, Joyce and post-war British fiction. His Skin: An Historical Poetics will appear from Reaktion in 2003 He is a founding member of the London Beckett Seminar. Website

Colin Duckworth has published widely on modern French literature and theatre, and is now a freelance writer, actor and director. His first novel, Steps to the High Garden (1992) was described as "a witty, intelligent, academic version of Raiders of the Lost Ark". His second, Digging in Dark Places , (1997) is set mainly in Brittany, and was well received by the Australian Book Review. His third, Crash Landing, and fourth, The Seventh Harmony, await publication. He has written two children's opera libretti. Beauty and the Beast received nearly 400 hundred performances by the Victoria State Opera on tour. Cinderella was performed at the Port Fairy Festival and broadcast by the ABC. Music for these is by Michael Easton. He has completed The King is Dying, a libretto based on Ionesco's Le roi se meurt , for the English composer Edward Cowie.
His theatre productions in London, Auckland and Melbourne include plays in English and French by Beckett, Ionesco, Scribe, Jarry, Christopher Fry, Tardieu, Rostand, Voltaire, and Vanbrugh. He most recently directed the Australian première of Beckett's En attendant Godot for the Melbourne French Theatre Company. On stage he has performed major rôles in Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Capek, Giraudoux, Christopher Fry, Anouilh, Noel Coward, Albee and Beckett. He has appeared in several TV series, including Blue Heelers (as the Hungarian vet, Tibor), and in Neighbours as a judge, a bishop, and an Irish decrepit. His film rôles include M. Fournier in Devil in the Flesh and the lead rôle, Professor Chessey, in Zoltan Fecso's Rooms for Rent and Other Vacancies. He has taught literature and drama at the universities of Montpellier, Cambridge, London, California, Auckland, and Melbourne where he is now emeritus professor and professorial fellow.

Gerry Dukes lectures in literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick in Ireland. In 1985, in collaboration with the actor Barry >McGovern, he made a theatrical version of Beckett's postwar trilogy of novels. The resulting production, I'll go on, for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, has toured the world. Since then he has contributed essays, reviews >and articles to numerous journals, magazines and newspapers. In 2000 his annotated edition of Beckett's novellas was published by Penguin. More recently his Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett - a brief biography with over a hundred photographs - was also published by Penguin. He is currently writing a critical study of Synge, Joyce, Beckett and modernist Irish writing.

Stan Gontarski is professor of English at Florida State University and specialises in 20^th century Irish Studies, Anglo-European Modernism and performance theory. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, has been Guest Editor of American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and Drammaturgia. He is also General Editor for a book series with the University Press of Florida entitled "Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy," and currently edits the Journal of Beckett Studies. His books include The Grove Press Reader, 1951-2001 (2001), Modernism, Censorship and the Politics of Publishing (2000), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: The Shorter Plays (1999), Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1928-1989 (1996), The Beckett Studies Reader (1993), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: Endgame (1993), On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (1986), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (1985), and Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (1983). He has won many awards over the years including L. A. Weekly’s Best Director award for the English language premiere of Samuel Beckett's Company in February 1985 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater.

Michael Guest is Professor at Shizuoka University's Faculty of Information and Graduate School of Informatics, both of which he co-founded. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Beckett's later prose (University of Sydney, 1989), has published articles on Beckett in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Studies in English Literature (English Literary Society of Japan), and recently reviewed an international Korean production of Waiting for Godot (Sanwoollim Company, Seoul) for the Journal of Beckett Studies. He maintains broad research interests in Japanese arts and culture and English language education, and has published and presented work at international conferences in both these areas.

Sjef Houppermans is Professor of Modern French Literature at Leiden University, Holland. He is co-editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui. He is also the co-editor of Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines. L'oeuvre carrefour/l'oeuvre limite. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodophi, 1997)

Xerxes Mehta is the Artistic Director of the Maryland Stage Company and teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The current president of the Samuel Beckett Society, he has written about and directed Beckett's shorter plays for many years.

Yann Mével est Professeur de Lettres (Rennes). Thèse de Doctorat consacrée à l'imaginaire mélancolique dans les romans de Beckett. Membre de la Beckett Society (Etats - Unis) et de l'association "La Maison Samuel - Beckett" (Roussillon, France) . Co-directeur et co-éditeur du colloque international "L'affect dans l''œuvre beckettienne" (Université Rennes 2, 1999; Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no.10, 2000). Co-directeur du colloque international "Présence de Beckett. Samuel Beckett au centre des transformations culturelles du XXe siècle", Centre culturel de Cerisy (France , Normandie), été 2005. Publications sur l'œuvre de Beckett: -"Beckett et le terrain vague de la mélancolie", in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no.11, 2002 (actes du congrès de Berlin). -"Beckett géomètre ", in Cahiers de théorie littéraire, no.2 , 2001, Université Paris 7 . -"Sous le signe de Cronos: cannibalisme et mélancolie dans les romans de Beckett" , in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no. 10, 2000. -"Molloy: jeux et et enjeux d'un savoir mélancolique ", in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no. 8, 1999. -"En attendant Godot: éléments pour une étude de la théâtralité", in Lectures de Beckett (sous la direction de Michèle Touret), Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998.

Angela Moorjani is Professor of French and Affiliate Professor of Women's Studies at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland. On first reading Molloy ten years after the first performance of Godot, she made Moran's rapturous response to understanding the dance of the bees her own: "Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand." Her first attempt at understanding was her doctoral dissertation on Beckett under the direction of René Girard. This effort was followed by her early poststructural monogram Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (1982), in which she tied narrative repetitions (especially mise en abyme) to recurring textual effects and obsessions. In subsequent essays and books, including "Beckett's Devious Deictics" (1986-90), The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (1992), and Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics (2000), she devised a (post)Kleinian semiotics to probe the effects of violent projections of loss on writing and reading and other artistic practices. These efforts were necessarily influenced by and influenced in turn her teaching, bouts in academic administration, and the design of graduate programs in intercultural communication. Her most recent endeavor was editing (with Carola Veit) the 500-page selection of papers from the Beckett Symposium in Berlin that they had jointly organized. The bilingual volume (SBT/A 11, 2001) is entitled Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Fin sans fin en l¹an 2000.

Peggy Phelan is the Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts at Stanford University. She is the author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge, 1997); and the survey essays for the art catalogs Art and Feminism (Phaidon, 2001) and Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001). She is co-editor with the late Lynda Hart of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998). From 1997 to 1999, she was a fellow of the Open Society Institute's Project on Death in America. From 1985 to 2002, she worked in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her work has been performed at the London International Festival of Theatre, the AIR gallery in New York, and the Women's International Playwrights Festivals in Adelaide, Australia and Galway, Ireland. She also participated in group shows at The New Museum and Thread Waxing Space in New York, and the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, England. She has collaborated with the performance ensemble Goat Island (Chicago) in their Summer School projects; and with the performance artists Lois Weaver and Adrian Heathfield (New York and London).

Antonia Rodriguez-Gago is "Profesora Titular de Literatura Inglesa" in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is also coordinator of Drama and Theatre Studies in the Department of "Filología Inglesa" of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published several essays on Samuel Beckett and has published a bilingual edition and translation of Happy Days, Los días felices, de Samuel Beckett, which includes a critical introduction (Madrid, Cátedra, Letras Universales Nº117, 1986, second edition 1996). Rodriguez-Gago was instrumental in organising the 1985 theatrical tribute to Beckett entitled "Muestra sobre La Vida Y La Obra de Samuel Beckett" for which she translated Nana (Rockaby), Impromptu de Ohio and Catástrofe.

Mariko Hori Tanaka is Professor of English Language and Drama Studies at Aoyama Gakuin University. She has published several critical essays on Samuel Beckett, including "Special Features of Beckett Performances in Japan" in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning, eds., Beckett On and On..., "Postmodern Staging of Waiting for Godot" and "Elements of Haiku in Beckett" in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, and co-edited Yasunari Takahashi et al, Beckett Taizen (Beckett A to Z). She has also published numerous critical essays on contemporary British and American playwrights, and translated quite a few plays for professional companies in Japan, British and American plays for Japanese productions, and Japanese plays for overseas productions.

Yoshiki Tajiri holds an M.A. in English from the University of Tokyo and University of London. He is currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on Beckett and the prosthetic body, to be submitted to the University of London. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tokyo. His main research areas are Beckett, modernism and theory. He is translator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women into Japanese (1995) and coeditor of Beckett A to Z (1999).

Anthony Uhlmann is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney and convenor of the Samuel Beckett Symposium 2003. He is also the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). As part of a project sponsored by the Australian Research Council he is currently working on a monograph concerning Beckett and philosophy and (with Martin Wilson and Han van Ruler) the first English language edition of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx.