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Faculty Invites: The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century

Tuesday, February 25, 2025
3:30 p.m.
124 Sparks Building
Faculty Invites: The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century
Greg Barnhisel, Professor of English, Duquesne University

As a student and, eventually, professor, Norman Holmes Pearson changed the story of American literature, putting modernist poetry (especially by women) at its center. He was one of the founders of the discipline of American studies, and helped forge the alliance between universities, foundations and professional societies, and the national-security state in the 1950s and 1960s. And he was a spy. During World War II he created and headed X-2, the OSS’s counterintelligence branch, and helped design (and recruit for) the Central Intelligence Agency. In this talk, Greg Barnhisel will give an overview of Pearson’s unique career as a literary fixer, secret agent, cultural diplomat, academic bureaucrat, and one of the architects of the American Century.

Greg Barnhisel is professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015), and Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power (2024).

124 Sparks Building