Emory Report
January 22, 2008
Volume 60, Number 16

   
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January 22, 2008
‘Evenings with Authors’ will be feast for ears

By kim urquhart

Life of the Mind, the popular lunchtime lecture series that spotlights Emory’s best and brightest faculty members, is casting a glow on Emory’s authors.

Evenings With Emory’s Authors Series is a collaborative venture between the Office of the Provost and the Academic Exchange designed to recognize recently published authors.

Roughly twice a semester, the community will be invited to attend a reading, discussion, reception and booksigning with Emory scholars.

“This is a recognition of the significant time and scholarship involved in generating a new book, and we want to celebrate that,” says Santa Ono, vice provost for academic initiatives and deputy to the provost.
“It’s an opportunity for faculty to come together and celebrate one another’s accomplishments as scholars,” adds Academic Exchange Editor Allison Adams.

Ono hopes that students and staff will also attend, as many of the books will be of general interest.

The series begins Jan. 29 with Joseph Crespino, assistant professor of history, reading from “In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.” Free and open to the public, the event begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Woodruff Library’s Jones Room.

“Joe’s topic is immediate,” says Adams. “The rise of Southern conservatism is something we are going to be looking at pretty intensely in the next few months given the elections.”

As Crespino’s book demonstrates, the readings are designed to appeal to a broad audience, Ono says, and may also feature staff or student authors.

The initiative builds on the Feast of Words author celebration the Academic Exchange hosts each year at Druid Hills Bookstore, and addresses Year of the Faculty conversations that called for “the need to honor publicly and frequently the scholarly accomplishments among our faculty,” Adams says.

“This is a very busy campus and it’s easy for us to get caught up in our immediate work. I think it’s good for everyone to step back, look at the bigger picture and see the incredibly rich variety of accomplishment across the board,” Adams says.

For more information about the series as it continues, call the Office of the Provost at 404-727-6055.