Lamar Lecture Series

2012 Lamar Lectures

Michael Kreyling

Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University

A Late Encounter with the Civil War

Kreyling

10:00 am, Monday, October 15, 2012 "Race Suicide and the Civil War: Semicentennial"

7:30 pm, Monday, October 15, 2012 "Civil Rights and the Civil War: Centennial"

7:30 pm, Tuesday, October 16, 2012 "The Afterlife of the Civil War: Sesquicentennial"

Michael Kreyling is the author of The South that Wasn't There: Postsouthern History and Memory (2011), Inventing Southern Literature (1998), Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (1986), and Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order (1980) and several other works. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Previous Lamar Lectures

  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 and Hodding Carter (Greenville, Mississippi) – Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace
  13. Floyd C. Watkins (Emory) – The Death of Art: Black and White in the Recent Southern Novel
  14. George B. Tindall (UNC) – The Disruption of the Solid South
  15. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (UNC) – The Writer in the South
  16. Lewis P. Simpson (LSU) – The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature
  17. Clarence L. Ver Steeg (Northwestern) – Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia
  18. Walter Sullivan (Vanderbilt) – A Requiem for the Renascence: The State of Fiction in the Modern South
  19. Merrill D. Peterson (Virginia) – Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue
  20. 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)
  21. Richard Beale Davis (Tennessee) – A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading the Eighteenth Century
  22. Marcus Cunliffe (Sussex) – Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860
  23. Samuel S. Hill (Florida) – South and North in American Religion: A Comparative Analysis by Selected Epochs
  24. Thomas Daniel Young (Vanderbilt) – Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered
  25. Paul M. Gaston (Virginia) – Women of Fair Hope
  26. Richard N. Current (North Carolina, Greensboro) – Northernizing the South
  27. R. Don Higginbotham (North Carolina) – George Washington and the American Military Tradition
  28. Cleanth Brooks (Yale) – The Language of the American South
  29. John Shelton Reed (UNC) – Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy
  30. Marion Montgomery (Georgia) – Possum, and Other Receits for the Recovering of “Southern Being”
  31. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Stanford) – Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South
  32. Lucinda H. MacKethan (North Carolina State) – Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story
  33. Fred C. Hobson, Jr., (UNC) – The Southern Writer in the Postmodern South
  34. Bill Malone (Tulane) – Romance, Realism, and the Musical Culture of the Southern Plain Folk
  35. Eric J. Sundquist (UCLA) – The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern Black Fiction
  36. John Blassingame (Yale) – Planter Testimony (unpublished)
  37. Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Florida) – The Literary Percys
  38. Jack Temple Kirby (Miami University) – The Countercultural South
  39. Trudier Harris (Emory) – The Power of the Porch: Narrative Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Gaynor, and Randall Kenan
  40. Drew Gilpin Faust (Penn) – Women on Women in the War: The Civil War in Southern Fiction (unpublished)
  41. Eugene D. Genovese (Emory) – A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
  42. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (Mississippi) – Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West
  43. Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) – Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow
  44. 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
  45. Theda Purdue (UNC) – “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South
  46. Peter H. Wood (Duke) – Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream
  47. Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) – Henry Adams and the Southern Question
  48. James C. Cobb (UGA) – Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity
  49. Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) – Teach About the South (unpublished)
  50. Richard Gray (Essex) – A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature
  51. Anne Goodwyn Jones (Mississippi) — Before and After the War: Formations of Southern Manliness (unpublished)
  52. Paul Harvey (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs) — Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South
  53. Mark Smith (South Carolina) — Histories of a Hurricane: Camille, 1969
  54. Minrose Gwin (North Carolina) — Rembering Medgar Evers: Aesthetics, Justice, and the Long Civil Rights Movement
  55. Gary Gallagher (Virginia) — Becoming Confederates: Three Paths to a New National Loyalty