Brian Stonehill

Biography

Brian A. Stonehill was born on December 20, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. He spent a year at Lycee Lakanal in Sceaux, France, and a year at Varndean Grammer School for Boys in Brighton, England, and graduated from Forest Hills High School, New York. At 15 years of age he enrolled at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and spent his junior year of college at the University of Warwick in Coventry, U. K. By the conclusion of his undergraduate years, Stonehill had won the Newton Prize in English Literature, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated with high honors from Haverford in 1973.

He earned a Master of Arts degree in English with honors in 1974 and his Ph.D. in English with honors in 1978 from the University of Chicago. He wrote his dissertation "Art Displaying Art: Self-Consciousness in Novels of Joyce, Nabokov, Gaddis, and Pynchon," under the direction of Saul Bellow and Wayne Booth.

In 1979, Stonehill worked briefly as a fiction editor at the Chicago Review before joining the Pomona College faculty as an English professor later that year. During his eighteen years of teaching at Pomona College, Stonehill taught courses in creative writing, arts of persuasion, modern American literature, self-conscious fiction, contemporary film and fiction, contemporary fiction, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and the principles of visual literacy. He received Pomona College's Wig Award for Distinguished Teaching three times in 1982, 1987, and 1992, and was a beloved professor as evidenced in course evaluations and student comments submitted for the 1997 Wig Award.

Stonehill's success as a professor and scholar no doubt stemmed from his lifelong pursuit of knowledge and his visionary spirit. In a 1972 writing, "On Being a Professor," which was submitted by Stonehill for the Danforth Award Competition, he stated: "I want to teach because I want to learn more..." He also wrote, "A professor will be most successful in kindling enthusiasm if he himself feels genuinely enthusiastic about the material he has chosen to teach."

Brian Stonehill served as Chairman of the Humanities Division from 1981-1982 and was promoted to an Associate professor in 1983. Stonehill's development of the Pomona College Media Studies Program began in 1988 and it became a formal program during the 1991-1992 school year. After his promotion to Professor of English and Media Studies in 1993, Stonehill served as Chairman of the Humanities Division again from 1993-1997.

During the 1980s and 1990s Stonehill contributed book reviews to the Los Angeles Times and several other prominent publications, and was a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He served as a senior fiction judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes in 1992-1994. He frequently wrote opinion pieces for the Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor and their syndicates on subjects including the media's coverage of the Gulf War and other significant events, e-mail, cyberspace, video in the courtroom, and television viewing. Stonehill hosted Claremont Cubed, a weekly talk show on Claremont Colleges Television, participated as a commentator on "Antenne USA," Voice of America's French radio program, and served as a script development consultant for "French in Action," a successful language series aired by WGBH, Boston. Other media appearances include PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, KCET's Life and Times series, CBS Network News, National Public Radio, MonitoRadio, NBC radio, and various other local and national radio stations.

Brian Stonehill's other professional projects during the 1980s and 1990s range from book publication to the production of laserdiscs and the development of interactive CD-ROMs. Brian Stonehill's book, based largely based on his dissertation, the Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, was published in 1988. The same year he interviewed French commercial photographer Marc Garanger and recorded a translation in English that was included on the laserdisc, Regard for the Planet: 50,000 Photographs by Marc Graranger which received the Video Magazine award for Best Disc-Only release in 1989.

In 1990, Stonehill exhibited the prototype of a visual literacy CD-ROM at the Artists and Activists CD-ROM show at USC while steadily working on another laserdisc project, Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise). Children of Paradise, based on Marcel Carne's 1945 film, was produced and directed by Stonehill and received the Laser Tribune award for Best Special Feature Disc and Best All-Around Disc of 1991.

Brian Stonehill was a pioneer in the use of networked computers and the Internet as teaching tools at Pomona College and directed the creation of various Internet sites beginning in 1994. Project sites include the Online Visual Literacy Project and the Pomona Pynchon Page which were both awarded "CyberHound all-star fetch" prizes by Gale Publications online in 1996.

On August 6, 1997, Brian Stonehill died in an automobile accident. At the time of his death, he was writing a novel entitled High Definition, editing a manuscript entitled Media Literacy in the Digital Age which was accepted for publication by University of Texas Press, and producing a CD-ROM entitled Understanding D. W. Griffith.

In his last email login, Brian Stonehill left this final thought: "Language gives us ideas, including ideas of experience. Images give us experiences, including experiences of ideas."

Chronology