Following a keenly contested process, incoming Samuel Beckett Society President Patrick Bixby has announced the results of the election of new members to the executive committee. In a message to members, Professor Bixby decalared: ‘the next Vice President of the Society (to succeed to the Presidency in two years) will be Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick. A fortuitous tie for the member at-large position has allowed the current board to ratify one new member and co-opt another, meaning that Julie Bates of Trinity College, Dublin and Lucas Margarit of the Universidad de Buenos Aires will both be joining us’.
We congratulate all three new board-members and look forward their stewardship and energy in the coming years.
Dr Elizabeth Barry is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Warwick, UK, where she combines her research on Beckett with work in the medical humanities, especially in relation to ageing and end of life, psychology and psychopathology. Among a long list of publications is the influential Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and she also edited the important 2008 special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’, as well as the 2016 issue of Journal of Medical Humanities, ‘Beckett, Medicine and the Brain’. Liz is currenly working on a monograph on ageing in modern literature and thought which is due for publication by Bloomsbury in 2024.
Dr Julie Bates is assistant Professor in Irish Writing and co-Director of M.Phil in Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin where she is also a co-director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School. Julie’s work draws on scholarship within Environmental Humanities and she has published widely, being best known for her monograph Beckett’s Art of Salvage (Cambridge UP, 2017). Julie is currently working on a book which studies the dynamic between place and practice in the work of the writer and artist Erica Van Horn.
Dr Lucas Margarit is a poet, translator, and scholar currently professor of English Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. As well his numerous publications on Beckett, Lucas has written extensively on poetry and poetics in the early modern period. He edits the journal Beckettiana, the only scholarly journal in Spanish devoted to the author’s work, and he also hosted the Beckett Society’s last annual conference, the hugely succesful Beckett and Poetry/y la Poesía in Buenos Aires in November 2022.
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