Vanderbilt professor to speak on 'black neoconservatism' and race

Houston Baker, distinguished university professor at Vanderbilt University, will deliver this year's Robert Knoll Lecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Baker will speak at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27 in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St. The title of his speech is "Black Neoconservatism Shelby Steel Style: How the Civil Rights Movement Has Been Betrayed." The lecture is free and open to the public; a reception will follow the lecture.

Baker's expansive scholarship in literature and cultural studies encompasses African-American literature and poetics, Black British cultural studies, the Harlem Renaissance, rap music and the academy, modernism and the legacy of Booker T. Washington, and more recently, the connections between race, region, politics and civil rights. He has edited two special issues of American Literature. The first, "Unsettling Blackness," is devoted to African-American literary studies, and the second, "Violence, the Body, and the South," was a special issue devoted to New Southern Studies.

His most recent books include "Critical Memory: Public Spheres, Afro-Americans and Black Father and Sons in America," and "Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T. Washington." His forthcoming books are "I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South," and "The Betrayal of the Black Intellectuals: Afro-American Public Intellectuals in the Post-Civil Rights Era."

Prior to joining the Vanderbilt faculty, Baker taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and Duke University. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1992 and has served on numerous African and African-American Studies program advisory boards and committees.

The Robert Knoll Lecture is sponsored by the UNL Department of English in honor of Robert E. Knoll, the Paula and D.B. Varner professor of English (emeritus) at UNL.

CONTACT: Gerry Shapiro, Professor, English, (402) 472-1871