KU News Release

Author, KU alumnus to deliver April 10 lecture on Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream

Eric Sundquist

LAWRENCE — An award-winning author and alumnus of the University of Kansas will deliver the annual British and American Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Eric Sundquist is the UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California-Los Angeles. His lecture is titled “Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’: Whose Country ’Tis of Thee?” KU’s Department of English is sponsoring the lecture.

Sundquist is the author of numerous books, including “Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America;” “To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature;” “Faulkner: The House Divided;” and “Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865.”

He received the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa honor society and the James Russell Lowell Award from the Modern Language Association for “To Wake the Nations.”

From 1992 to 2002, Sundquist was dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. In 1997, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2007 he was named a recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1974 from KU, where he majored in English and philosophy.

“Sundquist is one of the most perceptive contemporary writers on the issues of race and ethnicity in American literature and culture,” said William J. Harris, KU associate professor of English. “His book, ‘To Wake the Nations,’ is a classic.”

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