JAMES R. HERBERT BOONE, A&S 1921, left his Baltimore home, the Oak Hill House, and art collection to Hopkins to support the humanities. The university used part of the proceeds of these gifts to endow this professorship. Mr. Boone and his wife, MURIEL HARMAR WURTZ-DUNDAS BOONE, spent much of their married life in Europe where they were granted audiences with the Pope and royalty in England and Italy. Mr. Boone made headlines in the 1930s for funding a lengthy but unsuccessful hunt for the famous sunken treasure of King John Lackland of England off the English coast. He died in 1983.
Held by Lisa M. Siraganian
Prior to her arrival at Hopkins as the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities, LISA SIRAGANIAN was the Ruth Collins Altshuler Director of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute and an Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. She is the author of Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2013) and her essays have appeared in Law and Literature, American Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, nonsite, Post45, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and most recently by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, for a Juris Doctor.
