Hall Center announces 2002-03 Humanities Lecture Series

LAWRENCE -- The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has announced the Humanities Lecture Series 2002-2003. The four speakers -- Jared Diamond, Robert D. Kaplan, Paule Marshall and David Bergeron -- each will take on a topic during the series, which is free and open to the public.

Jared Diamond, the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," will begin the series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, at the Lied Center. Diamond's book, on which the lecture will be based, won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize. Using recent advances in molecular biology, plant and animal genetics, archaeology and linguistics, the book sought to explain the broad pattern of human history on all the continents for the past 13,000 years. Diamond is a professor of physiology at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Medicine.

The second lecture of the series will take place at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 21, in the Kansas Union ballroom. Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic, will talk about his 20 years of traveling and reporting, much of which was in the world's most difficult and dangerous places, during "An Evening with Robert D. Kaplan."

Author Paule Marshall will discuss "The Triangular Quest for Self and Community: Brooklyn-Barbados-Benin." Marshall, the Frances and Floyd Horowitz lecturer 2002-2003, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003, in the Kansas Union ballroom. These three geographies have been said to constitute the principal compass points on the literary map of Marshall's fiction. From "Brown Girl, Brownstones" (1959) to "The Fisher King" (2000), her work has charted a course that deliberately reverses the triangular route of the slave trade. Her work celebrates black immigrant communities, Afro-Diasporic culture and black women.

David M. Bergeron, Conger-Gabel teaching professor of English at KU, is a recognized authority on Shakespeare, civic pageantry and the Stuart royal family. He will be the fourth and final lecturer. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, 2003, at the Spencer Museum of Art, Bergeron will present "Shakespeare in the Closet."

Victor Bailey, Hall Center director, said: "In keeping with the long and laudable tradition of the Humanities Lecture Series, the Hall Center has attracted speakers who will engagingly explore the important ideas and issues of our times. Each speaker is a recognized authority in his or her line of work, and each is capable of bringing an audience into the heart and soul of that work."

The Humanities Lecture Series is KU's oldest continuing series and one of the most distinguished lecture series in the Midwest. Founded in 1947, the series has been a consistent hallmark for quality, providing a forum for ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between renowned, engaging speakers and the university and surrounding communities. Visiting speakers spend two days on the KU campus, delivering a public lecture and participating in colloquia with faculty and students.

In the 50-year history of the Humanities Lecture Series, more than 160 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the program, including author Vladimir Nabokov, painter Thomas Hart Benton and author Aldous Huxley. Shortly after the program's inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member each year was added to the schedule.

Lectures have included environmental historian Richard White, Sheldon Hackney of the National Endowment for the Humanities, philosopher Cornel West, Latin American novelists Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, playwright Edward Albee, philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, literary theorist Edward Said and historian Dava Sobel. Many notable lectures by outstanding KU scholars have also been included in the annual series.

To select visiting scholars, the Humanities Lecture Series Committee invites nominations from KU faculty. The goal is to bring to campus scholars and artists whose work encompasses or redefines central problems in the humanities and who can frame their intellectual concerns for a multidisciplinary audience made up of non-specialists as well as specialists, including students, faculty and interested members of the community.