Richard A. Lanham

Stuffy Biography

Richard A. Lanham was educated at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and at Yale University, from which he holds the A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in English. He began his teaching career at Dartmouth College, and from 1965 to 1994 taught in the English Department at UCLA, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He has been an NEH Senior Fellow, a Senior Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the 1994 International Scholar at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and, in 1995, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at Tulane University. He is the author of The Motives of Eloquence, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, and eight other books of literary criticism and prose stylistics. His latest book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, was published, in both printed and electronic form, by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.

Prof. Lanham’s teaching career found its center in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and literary rhetoric from classical Greece to the present day. He has also throughout his career maintained a serious interest in student writing. In pursuit of this interest, he founded the UCLA Writing Programs, and directed it from 1979 to 1986. He has also written two composition textbooks, Revising Prose and Revising Business Prose, each with an accompanying video.

It was while working in the UCLA Writing Programs that he first became interested in electronic text, the latest chapter in the history of Western rhetoric. As Mellon Professor at Tulane, he taught An Introduction to Multimedia, and since then he has lectured extensively on text in digital expression. In 2001–02 he will pursue this topic and related ones on nine college campuses as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

Since 1971, Prof. Lanham has also acted as a literary consultant and expert witness in copyright disputes in the television and motion picture business. He has worked on cases involving King Kong, Jaws, Shampoo, Earthquake, Star Wars, Superman, and many other films. His television credits in this line of endeavor include The A-Team and Falcon Crest.

Prof. Lanham is the president of Rhetorica, Inc., a Los Angeles consulting and editorial services company.