George And Barbara Kelly Give $600,000 To Support English Department
September 28, 2000
University Park, Pa.–George and Barbara Kelly of Palo Alto, Calif., have given $600,000 to Penn State’s Department of English in the College of the Liberal Arts to establish three separate endowments in support of American literature.

Because of the Kellys, Robert Pinsky, the United States Poet Laureate, will visit Penn State on Wednesday, Oct. 4. Pinsky is the first poet laureate to visit the University, and is coming as the Dickinson Lecturer.

In 1999, the Kellys established their first endowment with a $50,000 gift, creating the Emily Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry. As the Kellys became more familiar with the English department, they established the George and Barbara Kelly English Endowment for Library Support with a gift of $50,000, as well as the George and Barbara Kelly Professorship in American Literature in the College of the Liberal Arts with a gift of $500,000.

"We wanted our gift to go where it would be meaningful," Barbara Kelly said. "Because English is so important to students, we thought our gift would do the most there."

George and Barbara Kelly met at Penn State shortly before graduating and met again in California, where George went to work for Deloitte & Touche, an international accounting firm, and Barbara began teaching junior high school. Shortly after they married, George received his M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and for the next few decades they raised four children and put them through college. George Kelly has since retired from Deloitte & Touche and serves on several corporate boards. In 1988 Barbara decided to go back to school and enrolled at San Jose State University, earning an M.A. in English literature in 1990. That experience led to her interest in supporting the Department of English.

"One of my first assignments was to select a literary figure and write an annotated bibliography," she said. "I chose Dickinson." She remembers at first wanting to write about a contemporary author, and she tried Sylvia Plath and Barbara Pym, a novelist, "but I couldn’t find enough material in the library for the assignment."

As Barbara recalls, she went home and started going through old textbooks, one of which she had kept from a course with former Penn State professor Joe Rubin. "I thought that looking at my old textbook might help to clarify my interest, and found I had indeed marked up a lot of Dickinson’s poems," she said. "Although choosing Dickinson was serendipitous and I can’t say her poetry at that point had been a lifelong passion, my interest does seem to go back to Professor Rubin’s class."

She wrote the bibliography and her professor urged her to publish it. She sent it to "Dickinson Studies," at the time the only journal in the field. It was accepted and she was asked to continue to write bibliographies and an occasional book review. By the time her association with the journal ended with the death of its editor in 1993, Barbara had also indexed five years of "Dickinson Studies."

At the same time, the Emily Dickinson International Society started two publications. The Emily Dickinson Journal, an academic publication, and the Bulletin, which Barbara Kelly described as "a professional news journal that sometimes runs to 30 pages." The editor of the Bulletin invited Barbara to serve as the book review editor, a position she has held since 1994.

Barbara has Penn State connections, however, that go beyond earning her B.A. in English literature at Penn State and taking a class with Professor Ruben. One of her two daughters (both of whom are enthusiastic readers) married a distant relative of poet and former Penn State professor Theodore Roethke.