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College of Liberal Arts
Mercer University > College of Liberal Arts > Lectures And Seminars > Lamar Lectures
Lamar Lectures
 
The Lamar Lecture series, made possible by the bequest of the late Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar, began in 1957.  The series promotes the permanent preservation of Southern culture, history and literature.  Given each fall, it is recognized as the most important lecture series on Southern history and literature in the United States.  Speakers have included nationally and internationally known scholars, such as Cleanth Brooks, James C. Cobb and Eugene Genovese.  All lectures are original and are then published as books by The University of Georgia Press.

Fall 2006 Lamar Lecturer

Richard Gray (Essex)

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

Richard Gray is professor of literature at the University of Essex and the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written a large number of essays and articles on American literature and edited a number of collections and anthologies including A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (co-edited with Owen Robinson). A regular reviewer for various newspapers and journals, including the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, he is a frequent contributor to BBC programs and features on American literature.

His books include The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (which won the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature), American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism and A History of American Literature. His recent public lectures include the inaugural Eccles Centre for American Studies lecture at the British Museum Library and the Sarah Tryphena Phillips lecture at the British Academy.

He has recently organized a major research project, Transatlantic Exchanges: The South in Europe-Europe in the American South. Funded by the Austrian and British Academies, this is a collaborative project involving 35 leading international authorities in the field of Southern studies from Europe, the United States and Asia.

Lamar Lecturers
1957-2006

  1. Donald Davidson (Vanderbilt) – Southern Writers in the Modern World
  2. Bernard May (Virginia) – Myths and Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
  3. Jay B. Hubbell (Duke) – Southern Life in Fiction
  4. T. Henry Williams (LSU) – Romance and Realism in Southern Politics
  5. Arthur Palmer Hudson (UNC) – Folklore Keeps the Past Alive
  6. Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., (Vanderbilt) – The Democratic South
  7. Edd Winfield Parks (Georgia) – Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic
  8. Thomas D. Clark (Kentucky) – Three Paths to the Modern South: Education, Agriculture, and Conservatism
  9. C. Hugh Holman (UNC) – Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe
  10. Clement Eaton (Kentucky) – The Waning of the Old South Civilisation, 1860s-1880s
  11. No Lecture – NB: 2 were delivered in 1968
  12. Fletcher M. Green (UNC) – The Role of the Yankee in the Old South
  13. Hodding Carter (Greenville, Mississippi) – Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace
  14. Floyd C. Watkins (Emory) – The Death of Art: Black and White in the Recent Southern Novel
  15. George B. Tindall (UNC) – The Disruption of the Solid South
  16. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (UNC) – The Writer in the South
  17. Lewis P. Simpson (LSU) – The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature
  18. Clarence L. Ver Steeg (Northwestern) – Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia
  19. Walter Sullivan (Vanderbilt) – A Requiem for the Renascence: The State of Fiction in the Modern South
  20. Merrill D. Peterson (Virginia) – Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue
  21. Jack P Greene (Johns Hopkins) – Paradise Defined: Studies in the Relationship between Historical Consciousness and the Emergence of Corporate Identities in Plantation America, 1650-1800 (unpublished)
  22. Richard Beale Davis (Tennessee) – A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading the Eighteenth Century
  23. Marcus Cunliffe (Sussex) – Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860
  24. Samuel S. Hill (Florida) – South and North in American Religion: A Comparative Analysis by Selected Epochs
  25. Thomas Daniel Young (Vanderbilt) – Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered
  26. Paul M. Gatson (Virginia) – Women of Fair Hope
  27. Richard N. Current (North Carolina, Greensboro) – Northernizing the South
  28. R. Don Higginbotham (North Carolina) – George Washington and the American Military Tradition
  29. Cleanth Brooks (Yale) – The Language of the American South
  30. John Shelton Reed (UNC) – Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy
  31. Marion Montgomery (Georgia) – Possum, and Other Receits for the Recovering of “Southern Being”
  32. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Stanford) – Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South
  33. Lucinda H. MacKethan (North Carolina State) – Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story
  34. Fred C. Hobson, Jr., (UNC) – The Southern Writer in the Postmodern South
  35. Bill Malone (Tulane) – Romance, Realism, and the Musical Culture of the Southern Plain Folk
  36. Eric J. Sundquist (UCLA) – The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern Black Fiction
  37. John Blassingame (Yale) – Planter Testimony (unpublished)
  38. Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Florida) – The Literary Percys
  39. Jack Temple Kirby (Miami University) – The Countercultural South
  40. Trudier Harris (Emory) – The Power of the Porch: Narrative Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Gaynor, and Randall Kenan
  41. Drew Gilpin Faust (Penn) – Women on Women in the War: The Civil War in Southern Fiction (unpublished)
  42. Eugene D. Genovese (Emory) – A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
  43. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (Mississippi) – Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West
  44. Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) – Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow
  45. Edward Ayers (UVA), Thadious M. Davis (Vanderbilt), Linda Wagner-Martin (UNC), Joel Williamson (UNC) – South To the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century
  46. Theda Purdue (UNC) – “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South
  47. Peter H. Wood (Duke) – Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream
  48. Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) – Henry Adams and the Southern Question
  49. James C. Cobb (UGA) – Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity
  50. Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) – Teach About the South (unpublished)
  51. Richard Gray (Essex) – A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

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