September 28, 2005
Daniel Born of Great Books Foundation to Speak at Fall Convocation

The Fall Convocation, celebrating the beginning of the 2005-2006 academic year, will take place at 3 p.m. on October 15, 2005 on the main quad of the Shimer campus, weather permitting.  Daniel Born, Vice President for Post-Secondary Programs at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago, will be the featured speaker. His speech is titled 'Of Books and Bombs: The Making of Robert Maynard Hutchins.'

Dan Born and Shimer President Bill Rice collaboratively launched the successful ‘Friday Forum Lecture Series’ at the Great Books Foundation in 2004-2005. The series will continue this year, and the two organizations will also work together, along with BenedictineUniversity in Lisle, Illinois, to host the April 2006 conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses in Chicago.

In addition to his responsibilities as a vice president at the Great Books Foundation, Born also serves as editor of The Common Review, the Foundation’s quarterly magazine. He is author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and he has degrees from Tabor College (B.A.), the University of Kansas (M.A.), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he earned his doctorate in English literature and did his dissertation under the supervision of Irving Howe. He has published on Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Leigh Hunt, and Don DeLillo, among others, and his essays have also appeared in mainstream publications including the New York Times and Education Week. Beginning in the spring of 2006 he will also assume duties as a lecturer in NorthwesternUniversity’s School of Continuing Studies (M.A. in Literature) Program.