The International James Joyce Foundation is pleased to announce that Hans Walter Gabler has been elected as an Honorary Trustee, a position reserved for those who have done extraordinary service to Joyce studies over the course of a career. Current and former honorary trustees include Umberto Eco, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Morris Beja, Fitz Senn, and Thomas Staley.
Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature and Editorial Scholarship (retired) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He undertook, as editor-in-chief, the Critical and Synoptic Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1984), and the critical editions of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (both 1993). As Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich, Germany, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate program from 1996 to 2002 on Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines.
Thanks to his innovative efforts, Joyce scholars around the world have access to rigorously edited versions of some of Joyce’s greatest works. And his synoptic edition has made it possible for us to understand the complex processes that led Ulysses from a handful of scribbled notes, through a magazine serial, and eventually to one of the modern era’s defining works of art. He not only created what most now refer to as the Gabler edition, but through decades of continuing scholarship has helped us all better understand just how complex and daring a task scholarly editing can be.