Ground-breaking scholar, poet, and author, Sandra M. Gilbert, will reflect on her work shaping the canon of women's literature and feminist literary criticism over the past 40 years.

Gilbert has co-authored with scholar Susan Gubar (Indiana University) key texts in the field of women's literature: the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism. Their monumental critical work, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, examines motifs, images, and themes of female authorship and desire in the work of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

Distinguished Professor of of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis, Gilbert is also the author of seven collections of poetry: In the Fourth World (Alabama), The Summer Kitchen (the Heyeck Press), Emily?s Bread, Blood Pressure, Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (the last four all from W. W. Norton), as well as, more recently, The Italian Collection (Depot Books). Belongings, her latest book of poems, appeared from Norton in 2005, and a prose work, Death?s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, was published by Norton in 2006. Gilbert has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death (Norton) and an anthology of elegies, Inventions of Farewell (Norton), along with a number of critical works, including Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (two editions, Cornell and Southern Illinois).

The S.A. Yoder Lecture Series, begun in 1972, honors Dr. Samuel A. Yoder, a professor at GC from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1946 until his death in 1970.