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Fourth President of Western Maryland College, 1935-1947
A lectureship in literature seems wholly appropriate as a partial recognition of Fred Garrigus Holloway. For, underneath his widely acknowledge skills as a preacher, administrator, and teacher, his love of music and of literature was reflected in everything he touched.
A graduate of the Class of 1919, he went on to earn a divinity degree from Drew University, and was ordained by the Methodist Protestant church in 1921. Married to Winifred Jackson soon after, he served charges in Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland before he was called to Westminster Theological Seminary in 1927 as Professor of Biblical Languages. There, his emergence as one of the church’s most powerful preachers and as a promising young administrator led to the presidency of the Seminary, and, after a short time, to the presidency of the College itself from 1935-1947. In a critical period of growth and change, his insistence on academic excellence and collegiality made a deep and lasting impression on the institution, and his brilliant sermons and poetry reading enlivened a difficult decade.
In 1947, he left the Hill to become President of Drew University, and in 1960 he was made Bishop of West Virginia in the United Methodist Church, retiring from that post in 1968. Dr. Holloway died on June 1, 1988, in Wilmington, Delaware.
Literature, especially poetry, was an integral part of his intellectual curriculum. Hence, the College, though well aware of his leadership in church and in education, has elected to present these annual scholarly lectures as a lasting tribute to one of Fred Holloway’s deepest commitments.
The annual Holloway lecture honors the deep commitment of past College President Fred Garrigus Holloway to the role of literature and poetry in the liberal arts. Below is a list of past Holloway speakers. Please note, there were no lectures for 2020 and 2021.
Click on the names to open a new window with a Hoover Library Catalog search of all items by that speaker.
1986 – M. H. Abrams, “How to Prove an Interpretation: Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’”
1987 – S. Schoenbaum – “All That is Known Concerning Shakespeare”
1988 – Louis D. Rubin, Jr. – “The High Sheriff of Yoknapatawpha: An Overview of William Faulkner”
1989 – Richard B. Sewall – “Emily Dickinson at Play”
1990 – Daniel Hoffman – “Hang-Gliding from Helicon”
1991 – Myra Jehlen – “Why Did the Englishman Cross the Ocean? A Sixteenth-Century Riddle”
1992 – Jonathan Yardley – “The Decline and Imminent Fall of American Literary Fiction”
1993 – Nancy A. Walker – “‘A Very Serious Thing’: Women’s Humor and American Culture”
1994 – John Barth – “The Storyteller’s Call”
1995 – Jackson R. Bryer – “‘Snooping’ or ‘Illuminating?’ Editing a Writer’s Correspondence”
1996 – Jane Tompkins – “The Re-Enchantment of Learning”
1997 – Paul Fussell – “The Poetry of Three Wars”
1998 – Peter Balakian – “The Moral Act of Memory: Writing a Memoir about Growing Up in the Suburbs and the Armenian Genocide”
1999 – Deborah Brandt – “The Plot of Literacy in American Lives”
2000 – Jerome J. McGann – “Scholarly Adventures in Computerland”
2001 – Steven Knapp – “Fiction, Terror, and Other Minds”
2002 – Michael Dirda – “Looking for a Good Time: Reading, Libraries, and the World of Books”
2003 – Dawn Trouard – “Remembering How to Seem: Teaching the Dead”
2004 – André Bernard – “Can Publishing Be Interesting?”
2005 – Dana Gioia – “A Poetry Reading”
2006 – Karla F. C. Holloway – “BookMarks: Reading Race, Reading Sports, and Other Public Preoccupations”
2007 – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen – “The Weight of the Past: Dreaming the Prehistoric in the Middle Ages”
2008 – Kevin McLaughlin – “Wiped Out: Matthew Arnold’s Resignation”
2009 – LeRoy Lad Panek – “McDaniel and His Hellish Crew”
2010 – Wendy Moffat – “Modern Sex”
2011 – Eric Sundquist – “We Dreamed a Dream: Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama”
2012 – Cynthia L. Selfe – “Stories That Speak to/about Us: Power, Problematics, and Narratives in Digital Contexts”
2013 – Carolyn Dinshaw – “It’s Not Easy Being Green: Medieval Foliate Heads and Queer Worldmaking”
2014 – William Gleason – “Masterpiece Theater Revisited: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Pulps”
2015 – Lynn Z. Bloom – “Why True Stories Matter”
2016 – James English
2017 – Robert S. Levine – “Frederick Douglass in Fiction: From Harriet Beecher Stowe to John Updike and James McBride”
2018 – Douglas Eyman
2019 – Amanda Bailey – “Shakespeare, Seriously.”
2022 – Martin Camper '07 – “Arguing Over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation”
2023 – Alisha Knight – “Great Authorial Expectations and Intentions: Editing Early 20th-Century Literature for 21st-Century Readers"
The Archives, located on the second floor of Hoover Library at McDaniel College, is available by appointment only.
