KU News Release

Author to present lecture about Muslims in Europe

LAWRENCE — Author, journalist and cultural commentator Ian Buruma will deliver the Frances and Floyd Horowitz Lecture at the University of Kansas.

Buruma’s talk, titled “Among the Unbelievers: Muslims in Europe,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The event is part of the Humanities Lecture Series, sponsored by KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities. It is free and open to the public.

Buruma is the winner of the 2008 Erasmus Prize, which is awarded annually to a person who has made an important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe. Previous winners of the Erasmus Prize include actor Charlie Chaplin, artist Henry Moore, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and writer Václav Havel. Buruma is one of the leading international essayists on East-West relations and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Buruma is the author of numerous books, including “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance,” which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best current-interest book. He has also written about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Lecture Series is the oldest continuing series at KU. More than 150 eminent scholars from around the world have participated in the program, including author Vladimir Nabokov, painter Thomas Hart Benton and author Aldous Huxley. Recent lecturers have included literary theorist Edward Said, former New York Times science reporter Dava Sobel, screenwriter Sherman Alexie and biologist E.O. Wilson. Shortly after the program’s inception, a lecture by one outstanding KU faculty member each year was added to the schedule.

The final speaker in the 2007-08 series will be Carol Ann Carter, a professor of art at KU. That event takes place April 24.

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