The Institute for the Humanities
College of Arts & Sciences
Distinguished Lecture Series 2005-2006

The Distinguished Lecture Series, which is sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities through the support of the College of Arts & Sciences, Office of Research, and Office of the Provost hosts reputable scholars, writers, and artists from around world. The Distinguished Lecture Series provides the community with the opportunity of not only hearing outstanding lectures, readings, and presentations, but actually meeting scholars and artists who are recognized as the best in their fields.

Mark Your Calendars!!

Fall 2011 Guests:

Amanda Foreman
"A World on Fire: Great Britain and the American Civil War"
Sept 20th at 4:00 p.m.
Bettersworth Auditorium, Lee Hall
Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-winning best seller, ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire' (HarperCollins UK; Random House US), and 'A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided (Allen Lane UK; Random House US). She lives in New York with her husband and five children. She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the Oscar-winning screen writer of many film classics including, The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone. She was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998. ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’ was a number one best seller in England, and best seller for many weeks in the United States. The book was nominated for several awards and won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1999. It inspired the movie ‘The Duchess’, staring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes. In addition to regularly writing and reviewing for newspapers and magazines, Amanda Foreman has also served on a number of juries including The Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Book Awards. 'A World on Fire' has been optioned by BBC Worldwide.

David Bell
"The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It""
Oct. 5th, 4:00 p.m.
McCool Atrium
David A. Bell is a historian of early modern France, whose particular interest is the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. He attended graduate school at Princeton, where he worked with Robert Darnton, and received his Ph.D. in 1991. From 1990 to 1996 he taught at Yale, and from 1996 to 2010 at Johns Hopkins, where he held the Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Humanities, and served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2010. Bell has written three books. Lawyers and Citizens (Oxford University Press, 1994) examined the politicization of the French legal profession in the eighteenth century, showing how spaces for radical criticism of the French monarchy first opened up within the structure of the French state itself. The Cult of the Nation in France (Harvard University Press, 2001) argued that nationalism, as opposed to national sentiment, was a novelty of the French Revolutionary period, and that it arose both out of, and in reaction to, Christianity. The First Total War (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), is a general study of the political culture of war in Europe between 1750 and 1815, which showed how an aristocratic culture of limited warfare gave way to a world in which total war was possible—and in which, between 1792 and 1815, it actually took place. His major current project is a dual biography of the French Revolutionaries Armand-Louis Gontaut and Charles-Philippe Ronsin—a project that he hopes will illuminate the relationship between politics, literature and war in the age of Revolutions.

Charles Hill
"Grand Strategies: How Literature Explains Statecraft and World Order"
Nov. 9th, 4:00 p.m.
McCool Atrium
Charles Hill, a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, Senior Lecturer in International Studies, and Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale University. He was a senior adviser to George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, as well as to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations. He teaches a host of courses about literature, statecraft, history, and politics at Yale. His book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order was published in June 2010 by Yale University Press. His newest book, Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism, was published by Hoover Institution Press in May 2011.

Spring 2011 Guests:

"The Environmentalists and their Critics: 1960-2010"
April 19th at 4:00 p.m., McCool Atrium
Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History, an Americanist specializing in religious, intellectual, and environmental history. He graduated from Oxford, England, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. in American History in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School (1985-1988) and has been at Emory since 1988. Author of six books, he is also the presenter of six lecture series with The Teaching Company http://www.teach12.com on aspects of American and British history. His current research and writing project is a history of the intellectual and political opponents of environmentalism, from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century.

"Kings, Saints, and Misfits: Biography and Its Discontents in Early Modern England"
March 31st, 4:00pm, McCool Atrium
Martine Watson Brownley, Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Winship Distinguished Research Professor, is Director of Emory’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She is an Associated Faculty member in the Comparative Literature Program and also in the Institute for Women's Studies, where she served previously as Director. Professor Brownley teaches courses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, in contemporary women writers, and in feminist theory. Her current research interests are early modern English historiography and also contemporary women novelists. Among her academic honors and awards are a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship; the Melanie R. Rosborough Fellowship from the American Association for University Women; research fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the William Andrews Clark Library, and the Folger Library; and the AAUW's Recognition Award for Young Scholars. Currently, she is the P.I. on the CHI’s $2.5 million NEH Challenge Grant.

Fall 2010 Guests:

“The Great Depression in Black and White: Documenting the Modernizing South in Word and Image”
November 8th, 4:00 p.m., McCool Hall Atrium
Professor Jeff Allred has been at Hunter College of the City University of New York since 2005. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, modernism, and literary theory, in addition to more specialized topics, such as “Documentary in Literature and Film,” “ABCs of Modernism,” and “Art/Work: Labor and Culture in the 20th Century US.” Professor Allred has published American Modernism and Depression Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2010), which surveys the uneven terrain of American modernity through the lens of photo-documentary books, including work by James Agee/Walker Evans, Richard Wright, and Erskine Caldwell/Margaret Bourke-White. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Foerster Prize (awarded annually for the best article in American Literature), a year-long fellowship at the CUNY Center for the Humanities, and a Duncan Fellowship at the Ransom Center for the Humanities. He has published book reviews and articles on American literature, modernism, and media studies in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Criticism: A Quarterly for the Arts, and others. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled ABCs of Modernism.

“Could Colonial Secession Have been Prevented without War? Some Reflections on the American War for Independence”
October 21st, 4:00 p.m., Atrium, Mc Cool Hall
For over fifty years, Jack P. Greene, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University, has profoundly influenced the fields of the colonial Americas and the Atlantic world. He has not settled for exploring one narrow aspect of early American history. Instead, Greene has tackled a wide variety of topics in numerous works, including Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (University of Georgia Press, 1986) and Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1988),which are considered required reading. He has produced scholarship on topics as diverse as the politics and culture of colonial British America, the American Revolution, legal and constitutional development, and slavery and race, and he has investigated the history of the Chesapeake, the lower South, and the West Indies. Greene’s editing talents have resulted in numerous documentary collections and editions, as well as essay collections such as The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (New York University Press, 1987) and the paradigm-shifting Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), which he co-edited with J.R. Pole. He is still an active scholar, with five works in progress.

Poetry Reading
Sherod Santos, October 7th, 4:00 p.m. Swalm Suite, Swalm Building
Poet and essayist Sherod Santos was born in 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), The Perishing (2003); The Pilot Star Elegies (1999), which won a Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize and was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award; The City of Women (1993); The Southern Reaches (1989); and Accidental Weather (1982), which was selected for the National Poetry Series.
In 2000, the University of Georgia Press published A Poetry of Two Minds, a collection of his essays.
His awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and the essay, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has also received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
From 1990 to 1997, Santos served as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

“Rollodores, Dead Heads, and Sidewheelers: The Lost Story of Tombigbee River Steamboats” Sept. 30th, 4:00 pm Atrium, McCool Hall
Rufus Ward has been active in the fields of history and historic preservation for more than thirty-five years. He divides his time between lectures on history-related topics and consulting on cultural projects. He also writes a weekly history column for the Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi. Ward has been a contributing author for two other books: After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi and By the Flow of the Inland River: A History of Columbus, Mississippi, to 1825. Additionally, he has published numerous journal and magazine articles on southern history. He is an advisor emeritus to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, having previously represented the state of Mississippi on its board of advisors.
Ward's past honors include the Calvin Brown Award from the Mississippi Association of Professional Archaeologists "in recognition of service by an amateur archaeologist in aid of historic preservation in the State of Mississippi" and a Resolution of Commendation from the board of trustees of the Mississippi Department of Archives & History for his "contributions and commitment to the preservation and interpretation of Mississippi History."

Poetry Reading
Ted Kooser, March 6th, 4:00 p.m. McComas Hall Auditorium
Ted Kooser is one of the nation’s most highly regarded poets and served as the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 - 2006. During his second term he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). A Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry. Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country.

Poetry Reading
Angela Ball, February 9th, 4:00 p.m. Swalm Suuite
Angela Ball is currently a professor at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM). in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. There she works at the Center for Writers, a creative writing program that offers M. A. and Ph.D. degrees in English with creative writing. She is also an editor for the Mississippi Review at USM's Center for Writers (Abbott 381). Angela Ball’s prize winning and frequently anthologized poems and translations have appeared in journals including The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Field, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Southern Review. Her books of poetry include Kneeling Between Parked Cars (Owl Creek Press, 1990); Possession (Red Hen, 1995); Quartet (Carnegie Mellon, 1995); and The Museum of the Revolution (Carnegie Mellon, 1999). Her newest collection, Night Clerk At the Hotel of Both Worlds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), received both the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Poetry and the Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. The recipient of an Individual Writer’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ball has represented the U.S. at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, and has been a writer in residence at the University of Richmond and at Chateau Lavigny near Lausanne, Switzerland.

"Anniversaries and Teleologies: Slave Trade Abolition Two Hundred Year Later."
Christopher Brown, September 23rd, 4:00p.m., McCool Atrium
Christopher L. Brown, professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the history of eighteenth century Britain, the early modern British Empire, and the comparative history of slavery and abolition, with secondary interests in the age of revolutions and the history of the Atlantic world. His book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism won the 2007 Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. Dr. Brown is also the recipient of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association, 2006, and the James A. Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association, 2006. He is now at work on two projects, one on British experience along the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and a second on the decline and fall of the British Planter class in the era of abolition and emancipation. He is affiliated with The American Historical Association, North American Conference on British Studies, and the Association of Caribbean Historians, to name a few. He lives in New York City.

"End of Empire: The Slow Decay of the Roman Superpower"
Adrian Goldsworthy, October 14th, 4:00p.m., McCool Atrium
Adrian Goldsworthy attended St John's College, Oxford University and took a First in Ancient and Modern History. Remaining at St John's, he was awarded a D.Phil. in Literae Humaniores (Ancient History) in 1994. The topic of his thesis was 'The Roman Army as a fighting force, 100 BC-AD 200'. A modified version of this was published in the Oxford Monographs series under the title of The Roman Army at War, 100 BC - AD 200 (1996). It is one of the best selling works in the series.
Adrian also served as a Junior Research Fellow at Cardiff University for two years and subsequently taught part-time at King's College London and was an assistant professor on the University of Notre Dame's London programme for six years. His latest book is The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Empire (2009).
Adrian lives in South Wales.

"Ambivalent Modernity: Romanticism, Literature, and Political Economy"
Thomas Pfau, November 10th, 4:00p.m., McCool Atrium
A native of Germany, Thomas Pfau began his academic career in 1980 as a student of History and Literature at the University of Constance. In 1982, he came to the U.S. where, at UC-Irvine, he joined the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Theory. In 1985, he continued his studies in the Comparative Literature Program at SUNY-Buffalo where he received his Ph.D. in 1989 with a dissertation on self-consciousness in Romantic poetry and theory (Wordsworth, Shelley, et al.). Since then, his main interests have broadened to include a large array of Romantic writers -philosophical, literary, historical- in England and Germany. His published work has explored such questions as paranoia as an mediation of historically induced anxiety (in Blake, Godwin and the 1794 Treason Trials); moral speech as performance (in Hegel and J. L. Austin); problems of historicism in contemporary Romantic Studies and the work of Walter Benjamin; the Romantic conception of textual interpretation (in Schleiermacher). Besides translating and editing two volumes of theoretical writings by Hölderlin and Schelling, he also edited two essay collections on English Romanticism . Following his 1997 book, Wordsworth's Profession (Stanford UP), his most recent study of English and German Romanticism, entitled Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794-1840 is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press

"The Burden of the Humanities"
January 28th: Wilfred M. McClay has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History, since 1999. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Dallas, and is currently a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program of Princeton University. He was appointed in 2002 to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994) won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history published in the years 1993 and 1994.

"Spartacus: The First Insurgent?"
March 24th: Barry Strauss grew up in and around New York City. He received bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in history from Cornell and Yale. He has lived and studied in Greece, Germany, and Israel and has traveled extensively in Italy, Turkey, Croatia, Cyprus, Jordan, and other countries with classical sites; he has also taken part in archaeological excavations. He speaks and reads seven foreign languages. After a brief stint as a newspaper reporter, Strauss has made his career as professor of history and classics at Cornell University and as director of the Peace Studies Program. He is the author of five books, including The Battle of Salamis, named one of the Best Books of 2004 by the Washington Post and being translated into five languages. He is co-author of two other books, and co-editor of still two other books. He has been interviewed for A&E, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the BBC and PBS.

"Poetry Reading"
April 9th: Martha Collins is the author of Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library. Collins' chapbook Sheer (Barnwood, 2008) is her most recent publication. She has also published four collections of poems, two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and an earlier chapbook of poems. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant. Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

“Civil War from Rome to Iraq: A History in Ideas”
September 11th, 4:30pm: David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Born in Britain, he was educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University and taught for eleven years at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 2004. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on five continents and has held fellowships in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Among his nine books to date are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal, and in 2008 Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in recognition of “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of ‘literature, history or art’.” He is currently working on three books: a history of the foundations of modern international thought, an edition of John Locke's colonial writings, and a history of the idea of civil war, from which his lecture will be drawn.

"Who Knew? Responsibility without Awareness"
October 14th: George Sher is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, where he has taught since 1991. Before coming to Rice, he taught at the University of Vermont for seventeen years. His essays on ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology have appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Ethics, and many other journals.. His books include Desert (Princeton University Press, 1987), Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Approximate Justice: Studies in Non-Ideal Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), and In Praise of Blame (Oxford University Press, 2006). His most recent book, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness, deals with the relation between knowledge and responsibility. It will be published by either Cambridge or Oxford University Press.

"The 'Pretense' of 19th century America and the origins of the Civil War"
Novembber 20th: Walter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at U.C. Berkeley for 13 years before going to Penn to direct its International Relations Program, which now has 350 majors. McDougall teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, most recently Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 (2004). His other recent books include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 (1997) and Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (1993). In 1986 Professor McDougall won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and former editor of Orbis, its journal of world affairs.

“Pioneer of Light Art”
January 23rd: James Turrell is an internationally acclaimed light and space artist whose work can be found in collections worldwide. Over more than three decades, he has created striking works that play with perception and the effect of light within a created space. His fascination with the phenomena of light is related to his personal, inward search for mankind's place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which he characterizes as having a 'straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime'. Turrell's art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience and meditation. "My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire."

“Fiction Reading”
February 28th: Christopher Coake is the author of a short story collection We're In Trouble (Penguin/Harcourt). The stories previously appeared in journals such as Five Points, Epoch, Gettysburg Review and The Southern Review. He received an MFA from Ohio State University, and in 2006 he was awarded the Robert Bingham Fellowship for best debut fiction from PEN American Center. He is currently at work on a novel set in turn-of-the-last-century Colorado. Coake, a native of Indiana, lives in Reno, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada.

"Uncovering the Bible with a spade: Kathleen Kenyon and the archaeology of the Holy Land"
March 6th: Miriam C. Davis first worked on an archaeological site as a teenager in Alabama. She first visited the Middle East at the age of sixteen. Graduated Magna Cum Laude from Emory University with a degree in History, she then spent a year in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews on a Bobby Jones Scholarship, studying history and archaeology. After receiving an MA in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara, she spent a year at the University of York (England) as a Fulbright fellow, taking an MA in medieval archaeology. She then received a PhD in medieval history from UCSB in 1995. Her scholarly work has concentrated on waste disposal and city cleaning in late medieval English towns and but she has also written for the popular press on archaeology and travel. Since 1995 she has taught at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Dr. Davis has participated in archaeological excavations in Alabama, Mississippi, England and Scotland.

“Blood and Rage: The Cultural Foundations of Terrorism”
April 9th: Michael Burleigh took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University, California. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Michael Burleigh's books include the best-selling The Third Reich: A New History (Pan Macmillan) which won the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge University Press 1997); Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-1945 (originally 1994 Pan Macmillan 2002); The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge University Press 1991-); Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (originally 1988 Pan Macmillan 2002); Confronting the Nazi Past (St Martin's Press 1995) Prussian Society and the German Order (Cambridge University Press 1984).

"Poetry Reading,"
April 16th: Rodney Jones is the author of eight books of poetry: the forthcoming Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985–2005 (2006), Kingdom of the Instant: Poems (2004), Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999), Things That Happen Once (1996), Apocalyptic Narrative (1993), and Transparent Gestures (1989), all from Houghton Mifflin, as well as The Unborn (Atlantic Monthly, 1985) and The Story They Told Us of Light (Alabama, 1980). He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter IB Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, a Harper Lee Award, and the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at University of Southern Illinois.

"Seeing the South: A Southern Tradition in the Visual Arts"
September 11th: Richard King is Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Nottingham, UK, specializes in the American South. Works include Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970, (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD.: Woodrow Wilson Center /John Hopkins University Presses, 2004) that won the BAAS Outstanding Book Award for 2004 and Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, New York: OUP, 1992.

"Burdens of Family: The Duke of Wellington and Career Building in Georgian Britian "
October 18th: John Severn, Professor of History, University of Alabama, Huntsville, specializes in British diplomatic and political history of late Georgian Britain, with special emphasis on the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. He is the author of two books, A Wellesley Affair: Richard Marquess Wellesley and the Conduct of Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1809-1812, and Architects of Empire: The Duke of Wellington and His Brothers. He is a long-time Director and Treasurer of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 where he has contributed editorial skills for the annual Selected Papers and served as a regular presenter and commentator at the annual conference. He is a fellow of the International Napoleonic Society and a member of the North American Conference on British Studies. He has lectured in Spain, Portugal, Great Britain and the United States. His years in education have been divided between secondary education in the private schools and the University of Alabama in Huntsville where he is Professor of History and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies.

"Things as They Eloquently Are"
November 13th: Michael McFee, Poet and Professor of English,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has published nine collections of poetry, most recently The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007). In 2006, I published my first collection of essays, The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview (University of Tennessee Press). I have also edited This is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 Contemporary North Carolina Writers, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2000, a companion anthology to my The Language They Speak is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets, published by UNC Press in1994.

Poetry Reading
April 19th: Stanley Plumly, was born May 23, 1939, in Barnesville, Ohio. Plumly graduated from Wilmington College, a small work-study school in Ohio, in 1962. While he was in college, his writing talents were recognized and encouraged by the playwright-poet-teacher Joel Climenhaga. Plumly received his M.A. from Ohio University in 1968 and did course work toward a Ph.D. at the same school. The writer's father, who died at the age of fifty-six of a heart attack brought on by his chronic alcoholism, dominates the poet's work. Plumly's six books of poetry include The Marriage in the Trees (Ecco Press, 1997); Boy on the Step (1989); Summer Celestial (1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977), which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Giraffe (1973); In the Outer Dark (1970), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Most recently, he wrote the nonfiction book Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (Other Press, 2003). He has taught at numerous institutions including Louisiana State University, Princeton, and the Universities of Iowa and Houston. His honors include a Guggenheim, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"Reality Under Siege,"
March 22nd: Sandy Skoglund, Professor and Artist, studied studio art and art history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1964-68. She went on to graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1969 where she studied filmmaking, intaglio printmaking, and multimedia art, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.
    Skoglund moved to New York City in 1972, where she started working as a conceptual artist, dealing with repetitive, process-oriented art production through the techniques of mark-making and photocopying. In the late seventies Skoglund’s desire to document conceptual ideas led her to teach herself photography. This developing interest in photographic technique became fused with her interest in popular culture and commercial picture making strategies, resulting in the directorial tableau work she is known for today.

"Mrs. Adams in Winter"
February 22nd: Michael O'Brien–Professor of Intellectual History, Jesus College, Cambridge University, mainly writes about the intellectual culture of the United States. He has been especially interested in the American South, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: its literature, political philosophy, historical imagination, and sense of self, as it has been formed by local social experience and interactions with other cultures. He is now writing a biography of Louisa Catherine Adams (1775-1852), the wife of John Quincy Adams; the book will focus on her journey from Saint Petersburg to Paris in the winter of 1815.

"A History of English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900"
February 13th: Andrew Roberts––Historian who received an honors degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he is an honorary senior scholar. He is well known to transatlantic audiences for his seven-hour NBC broadcast with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and his CNN broadcasts at the time of the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.