Edward L. Ayers to Present 2016 Gilder-Jordan Lecture on September 7
Edward L. Ayers to Present 2016 Gilder-Jordan Lecture
The Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History will take place at 7pm on Wednesday, September 7 in Nutt Auditorium on the UM campus. The 2016 lecturer is Edward L. Ayers of the University of Richmond, and his talk will be “When History Doesn’t Move in a Straight Line: The Civil War Then and Now.”
On the morning and afternoon on September 7, the Southern Documentary Project will film an interview of Ayers by Ted Ownby, and then Ayers will meet with graduate students in Southern Studies and history.
Edward Ayers is President Emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he now serves as Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities. Previously Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where he began teaching in 1980, Ayers was named the National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2003.
A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited 10 books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2013.
A pioneer in digital history, Ayers created “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War,” a website that has attracted millions of users and won major prizes in the teaching of history. He serves as co-editor of the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab and is a co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.
Ayers has received a presidential appointment to the National Council on the Humanities, served as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Organized through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the African American Studies Program, Center for Civil War Research, and the Department of History, the Gilder-Jordan Speaker Series is made possible through the generosity of the Gilder Foundation, Inc. The series honors Richard Gilder of New York and his family, as well as his friends, Dan and Lou Jordan of Virginia. Contact Becca Walton at rwalton@olemiss.edu if you have any questions about the lecture.