Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A Harvard University teacher, researcher and writer recently named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world will speak Monday [Oct. 29] at Mississippi State.
Steven Pinker will be featured at the Conerly Honors Lecture Series program in McCool Hall's new first-floor Taylor Auditorium. "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature" is both the topic of his 7:30 p.m. public presentation and his forthcoming book.
Pinker's visit to the university is organized by the Shackouls Honors College and nine other campus units. While at MSU, he also will meet with faculty and students in the psychology department and the Institute for Neurocognitive Science and Technology, two other co-sponsors.
Pinker, who holds Harvard's Johnstone Professorship in Psychology, is an award-winning leader in the field of visual cognition and the psychology of language. In 2002, he was a Pulitzer Prize-nominee for his New York Times bestseller "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" (Viking).
Several years earlier, his "How the Mind Works" (Penguin Books Australia Ltd.) also was a Pulitzer finalist, while his 1994 classic, "Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language" (HarperCollins), helped popularize his research to a worldwide audience.
Pinker's Mississippi visit also is sponsored by the offices of the President, Provost and Vice President for Research and Economic Development; colleges of Arts and Sciences, and Business and Industry; Bagley College of Engineering; and Social Science Research Center.
An ongoing program of the region's oldest and largest honors college, the Conerly Lecture Series is made possible by MSU alumnus and Destin, Fla., attorney Lamar Conerly and his wife Tracy.
For additional information, contact the honors college at 662-325-2522.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.