KU News Release

Award-winning ‘Black Athena’ author to present lecture April 14 at KU

LAWRENCE — Martin Bernal, professor emeritus at Cornell University, will present this year’s Marwa Africana Lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, April 14, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. His lecture is titled “Black Athena and the Reaction to It.”

The event is sponsored by the departments of classics and African and African-American studies at the University of Kansas. It is free and open to the public.

Bernal also will make a special presentation to KU professors and graduate students in the classics and linguistics departments.

Bernal holds a doctorate from Cambridge University and has studied at Harvard University, the University of California-Berkeley and Peking University. He stirred controversy and debate with the publication in 1987 of his book “Black Athena — The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985.” He published “Black Athena 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence” in 1991 and “Black Athena 3: The Linguistic Evidence” in 2005.

The first two volumes have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. “Black Athena 1” won the American Book Award in 1990, and the Japanese translation of “Black Athena 2” won the Mainichi Shimbun Book of the Year in 2004. Bernal was the recipient of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Gold Medal in 2005.

Books such as “Black Athena Revisited,” edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers, and “Heresy in the University: the Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals” by Jacques Berlinerblau have been written in reaction to the “Black Athena” volumes.

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