February 3, 1999
His lecture, "The Strength of These Arms: Endurance, Creativity, and Authority in the Plantation Landscape," is the third in the 1998-99 Humanities Lecture Series sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities at KU.
Vlach is a professor of American studies and of anthropology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. He also directs the folklife program at George Washington University.
Vlach will discuss his work on plantation architecture, and will examine the strategies of everyday resistance that were available to enslaved African Americans. Vlach's published works are regarded as classics in the fields of architecture, art history, material culture studies and African-American history.
His books include "The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts" (1978), "By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife" (1991), and his newest work, "Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery" (1993).
Dennis Domer, KU assistant dean of architecture and urban design and assistant professor of American studies, describes Vlach's work on antebellum architecture and African culture in the United States as groundbreaking, redefining our conceptions of slavery and ethnicity.
In the book, "Before Freedom Come: African-American Life in the Antebellum South," edited by Edward D.C. Campbell Jr. and Kym S. Rice, Vlach writes, "Yet even though the grand plantation was an atypical landscape for whites, it was for enslaved blacks, on the other hand, a significant and common environment. . . . Through the first half of the 19th century the plantation was thus the crucible for a large portion of the black experience."
Vlach has received numerous grants and awards and has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, Colonial Williamsburg Inc., the Museum of the Confederacy, and the American Craft Museum; the J. Paul Getty Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for the Advanced Study of Art, Design and Material Culture.
The final speaker in this year's Hall Center Lecture series is law professor, writer and commentator Patricia Williams, of the Columbia School of Law, New York City. She will present "Toward a Theory of Grace" at 8 p.m. March 15 in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.