Meet the Fall Kickoff Speaker
Julia Keller, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune. She joined the Tribune in late 1998.
Keller was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, daughter
of a college mathematics professor and a high school English teacher, a
mix of the sciences and the humanities that continues to beguile her to
this day. She wrote a Tribune series on traumatic brain injury and another on the deadly tornado in Utica, Ill.; she has profiled physicists and poets.
Keller earned a bachelor's and master's degree in English from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia and a doctoral degree, also in English, from Ohio State University. Her dissertation explored literary biography, focusing on biographies of Virginia Woolf.
She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied technologies of literacy, with a side helping of astrophysics. In the fall of 2006, she was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University. Keller also is guest essayist on the PBS program "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
Her book, Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It, which argues that the emergence of the machine gun in 19th Century America was an important cultural touchstone as well as a military one, will be published by Viking in May 2008.