We will add more fellows and alumni to this list. Most of them continued their work with the project during their years of study at Emory, which means that they are exposed to all of the varying tasks of textual editing: from transcription and data record keeping to basic research as well as work in archives here and abroad. Many have traveled with the editors or conducted research when they were abroad. All have also gained basic skills of editing by helping with the final preparation of the manuscript as it went through its pre-publication stages.

Brief Biographies

Martha Dow Fehsenfeld studied at Bennington College (B.A.), the University of North Carolina (M.A.) and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (doctoral work). She was authorized by Samuel Beckett to edit his correspondence in 1985.

Martha Fehsenfeld is the author of Beckett in the Theatre, with Dougald McMillan (1988; rpt.1990). She observed and recorded Beckett's direction of Footfalls, Happy Days, Endgame, and supervision of Waiting for Godot, was production assistant for Endgame directed by Samuel Beckett, assistant to the director Alan Schneider for the world premiere of Ohio Impromptu, and has performed in Beckett’s Happy Days, Footfalls, and Rockaby — the later directed by Walter Asmus. Originator of The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays broadcast on PBS and CBS, she served as Project Director for the first production All That Fall (funded by the NEH and the NEA, and awarded the Gold Medal at the International Radio Festival of New York, 1987). She has served on the Advisory Committee of The Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, England, and the board of the Alan Schneider Memorial Fund Theatre Communications Group, New York.

Lois More Overbeck, is Director of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project in the English Department of Emory University. She served as Research Associate, The Graduate School, Emory University since 1990, and Visiting Lecturer, Department of  Theatre Studies, Emory University. She was authorized by Samuel Beckett as Associate Editor and is now Co-Editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett; she directs the project at Emory University.

Lois Overbeck studied at Beloit College (B.A.), the University of Chicago (M.A.), and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). She edited The Beckett Circle of The Samuel Beckett Society (1984-1989), and she has published widely on Beckett and modern drama. She was a consultant for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, project director of a collaborative, city-wide festival, Beckett/Atlanta (1987) and a coordinator of the Year of Beckett - 2006, Atlanta, a festival of performances, lectures and workshops (by international directors and scholars Walter Asmus, Marek Kedzierski, Michael Haerdter working with local theatres and universities) celebrating Beckett's centennial year. She edited, with Paul Jackson, a collection of essays and interviews on the plays of Adrienne Kennedy, Intersecting Margins (1992). 

George Craig (d. 2019), Honorary Research Fellow, the University of Sussex, formerly Reader in French, The School of European Studies, University of Sussex. His distinguished scholarship includes a critical edition of Marguerite Duras, Des journées entières dans les arbres (1972), and with co-editor Margaret McGowan, Moy qui me voy: the Writer and the Self from Montaigne to Leiris (1989), together with essays on Hugo, Mallarmé, and Proust, and on reading.  He was for many years a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He brings unique personal credentials to his role as French translator: born and educated in Ireland, he followed in Beckett’s own academic pathway from Trinity College Dublin to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. 

Daniel Gunn, Professor of Comparative Literature & English at The American University of Paris, holds degrees from the University of Sussex. He is a novelist, critic, and translator with interests principally in twentieth-century European literature. His critical works include Psychoanalysis and Fiction: an Exploration of Literary and Psychoanalytic Borders (1988) and Wool-gathering of How I Ended Analysis (2002). His works of fiction include Almost You (1994) Body Language (2002) and The Emperor of Ice Cream (2014). He is Director of AUP’s Center for Writers & Translators and Series Editor of the Center’s publications (the ‘Cahiers Series’). He regularly reviews European fiction for the Times Literary Supplement.

Dan Gunn is editor of The Cahiers Series, published by the Center for Writers & Translators, The American University of Paris, with Sylph Editions. 

Viola Westbrook, Senior Lecturer, German Department, Emory University and German translator for the edition, was born in Berlin and raised in Hamburg.  She studied at Alfred University (NY), the University of Frankfurt, and Emory University, and has taught at the European campus of the University of Maryland, Agnes Scott College, and Emory University. She founded the Consortium for German in the Southeast (USA) and has led immersion language seminars and workshops for students as well as teachers of German. She was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz by the Federal Republic of Germany for her efforts towards building German American relations. She is the German translator for the The Letters of Samuel Beckett. 

There is a serendipitous aspect to her involvement with The Letters of Samuel Beckett in the surprising discovery of Beckett’s brief courtship of her mother, Ilse Schneider von Keller, during his stay in Hamburg in 1936, which has added a very personal note to her work with Beckett’s accounts of his German journey in volume one of The Letters.