Kwan Laurel Endowment Fund for the Humanities launched

The School of Humanities (SOH) launched the Kwan Laurel Endowment Fund for the Humanities with an inaugural lecture featuring David Crystal, a renowned British author and editor of over a hundred books. 

The Kwan Laurel Endowment Fund was conceived by Rodney Kwan Laurel, CEO of Acupoint Systems, and Robert Kwan Laurel, CEO of Sunfu Solutions Inc., in honor of their parents, Roberto and Erlinda. 

During the 2 April 2022 launch, Robert Kwan Laurel expressed his gratitude to Dr Maria Luz C Vilches, Vice President of the Loyola Schools, and SOH Dean Jonathan Chua for allowing them to create the endowment. In addition, he thanked his brother, who agreed to contribute to Ateneo despite graduating from a different university. 

"It is a great honor of our family to be part of this program and to be able to have an endowment at the Ateneo de Manila University," he said.

The endowment fund aims to support lectures, workshops, and similar engagements to aid in SOH development. The Kwan Laurel brothers initially longed for an on-campus experience for the inaugural lecture. They also shared their desire to have a non-Filipino speaker to afford the audience a different perspective. Thus, English scholar David Crystal was invited to deliver the inaugural lecture.

David Crystal specialized in English Language Studies at the University College London and is the author and editor of over a hundred books. These include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, We Are Not Amused: Victorian Views on Pronunciation, and Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, and in collaboration with his son, Shakespearean actor Ben Crystal, Shakespeare's Words, The Shakespeare Miscellany, and the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary. In addition, he was a Master of Original Pronunciation at Shakespeare's Globe and worked in original pronunciation productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida. 

Crystal gave a talk about the new trends in the language study of Shakespeare. The conversation debunked long-standing myths about the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary and his lexical inventiveness, new horizons opened up by online sites such as shakespeareswords.com, and recent applications of linguistic research in the theatre, especially using original pronunciation. In his lecture, he emphasized that studying language in relation to Shakespeare or others is embedded within literary, dramatological, cultural, and perspectives. He also discussed the importance of having a deep understanding of the language before one can break and bend it for literature. There is no real divide between language and literature, he said.

The program ended with a closing remark given by Vilches, expressing her gratitude to the donors and the event's guest speaker. 

Watch the lecture.