GENESEO, N.Y. – Pier Gabrielle Foreman, the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, will deliver this year’s Walter Harding Lecture Nov. 16 at SUNY Geneseo.
The lecture, titled “To Speculate Darkly: Slavery, Black Visual Culture and the Promises and Problems of Print,” begins at 7:30 p.m. in the college’s Doty Recital Hall and is free and open to the public.
As a scholar of African American studies and 19th-century literary history and culture, Foreman has examined the relationship between literary and activist practices. Her book, “Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century,” examines this relationship in the work of authors Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Frances E.W. Harper, Victoria Earle Matthews and Amelia Johnson.
Foreman is co-author, with Reginald Pitts, of the Penguin Classics edition of Harriet Wilson’s 1859 autobiographical novel, “Our Nig, Or, Sketches From The Life Of A Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There.”
Foreman earned her doctorate in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
Geneseo launched the annual Harding lecture in 2004 in honor of the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus Walter Harding, who was the world's leading scholar on 19th-century author Henry David Thoreau and founding secretary and former president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest international organization devoted to the study of any American author.
Harding's wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of Geneseo students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.
Media Contact:
David Irwin
Media Relations Director
(585) 245-5529
Irwin@geneseo.edu