2011-2012 Schedule

Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History

Dr. David T. Courtwright

Sky as Frontier:
America's Air and Space Century

September 13, 2011 | 7PM | Wright Auditorium

David Courtwright is John A. Delaney Presidential Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. in History from Rice University. Much of Courtwright's scholarship has focused on the special problems of frontier environments in history. (more...)

The Premier Lecture

Sir Salman Rushdie

Public Events, Private Lives:
Literature and Politics in the Modern World

October 5, 2011 | 7PM | Wright Auditorium

Sir Salman Rushdie, a fervent champion of freedom of expression, will deliver the 2011-2012 Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series’ Premier Lecture, "Public Events, Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World."Rushdie has written award-winning novels, including Midnight's Children (which received the Booker Prize in 1981, and the "Booker of Bookers" Prize in 1993) and The Satanic Verses (1988). This last work so incensed the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) that he issued a fatwā calling for Rushdie’s death. (more...)

A University Lecture

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

African-American Lives:
Genetics, Genealogy, and Black History

November 10, 2011 | 7pm | Wright Auditorium

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. He became a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year at Yale. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. (more...)

The Thomas Harriot Lecture

Bland Simpson

“Temperate Air, Requisite Care”—from Thomas Harriot’s “Conclusion” in A Briefe & True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)

February 2, 2012 | 7PM | Wright Auditorium

Bland Simpson is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of many books including Heart of the Country, A Novel of Southern Music (University of Georgia Press, 1996); The Great Dismal, A Carolinian's Swamp Memoir (UNC Press, 1998); The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, A Nonfiction Novel (UNC Press, 1993); Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain (UNC Press, 1997), with photography by Ann Cary Simpson; Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering (UNC Press, 2005); The Inner Islands: A Carolinian's Sound Country Chronicle (UNC Press, 2010); and The Coasts of Carolina: Seaside to Sound Country (UNC Press, 2010). (more...)

Jarvis Lecture on Christianity and Culture

Dr. J. Kameron Carter

Religion and the Post-Racial Condition

March 13, 2012 | 7PM | Wright Auditorium

Professor J. Kameron Carter teaches courses in theology and black church studies at Duke University. Working as a theologian, he addresses the basic areas of Christian thought, especially Christology (the person and work of Jesus Christ) and theological anthropology (the human being in the Christian perspective). In engaging such matters, he does so with a view not just to the church or to Christian believers, but also to the broader humanities, particularly, such fields as cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy, and literature. His most recent book is entitled, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008). (more...)

Parking & Directions for Wright Auditorium

Contact

John A. Tucker, Ph.D., Director
Harriot Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series
A-317 Brewster Building
East Carolina University
252.328.1028