College of Humanities and Social Sciences announces Brown Bag Lecture Series

Oct. 18, 2007 -- Dr. Gloria Gibson, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, announces the launch of the college’s Brown Bag Lecture Series. This series of lectures provides a congenial atmosphere for learning about current academic work in the humanities being done by faculty and graduate students at ASU. The series also offers a look inside the profession of academia. All lectures are free, and the public is invited.

The first lecture in the Brown Bag Lecture Series will be held Thursday, Oct. 18, at 3:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 206.  “A Big Western Life: The Challenging Biography of Granville Stuart,” will be delivered by Dr. Clyde Milner II and Dr. Carol O’Connor, of the department of history at ASU. The two historians spent nine months as visiting scholars at Yale in 2006-07 preparing a draft of their book, "A Big Western Life: The Challenging Biography of Granville Stuart," to be published in spring 2008 by Oxford University Press. The couple also jointly presented the 2007 Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Fellow's Lecture at Yale University in March. That lecture discussed the challenges Dr. Milner and Dr. O'Connor faced while writing about a man whose life intersected with so many themes in the history of the North American West. Dr. Milner was Yale’s  2006-07 Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Research Fellow and is currently director of ASU’s Heritage Studies PhD program. Dr. O’Connor was Yale’s 2006-07 Visiting Fellow in History and is currently associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at ASU.

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 2 p.m., in Wilson Hall, Room 217b, the Brown Bag Lecture Series will feature Dr. Erik Gilbert, professor of history at ASU, who will give a lecture, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”  Dr. Gilbert’s lecture is an examination of the process that transformed dhows, the traditional sailing ships of the western Indian Ocean, from hated symbols of the slave trade to romanticized icons of cultural heritage.

The final lecture in the Brown Bag series will be Thursday, Nov. 29, at 3:30 p.m. in the International Education Center, Room 251. That lecture, “Hardcore Dance: A Ritual,” will feature Mr. Thurel George, with Dr. J. Patrick Williams, professor of sociology. Mr. George will discuss his research on hardcore dancing and what hardcore dancing means to the people who perform it.

For more information, contact the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at (870) 972-3973.

 

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