Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A prominent University of Notre Dame historian and a Mississippi State University doctoral candidate will lead the 2009 John F. and Jeanne A. Marszalek Lecture Series.
Sponsored annually by the MSU Libraries, the public program featuring professor Philip Gleason and graduate student Kirk Strawbridge of Sulligent, Ala., will get under way at 2 p.m. March 25 in the John Grisham Room of Mitchell Memorial Library.
Strawbridge's presentation is titled "Modernity, Tradition and Identity after the Civil War: A Former Confederate General's South."
"Those Already Here and Those Just Arriving: Immigration and the Coming of the Civil War" will be the title of Gleason's address that concludes the program.
Gleason is a doctoral graduate of Notre Dame, where he taught until retiring in 1996. Among his career achievements are two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, along with academic recognitions from the United States Steel Foundation, American Philosophical Society and Lilly Endowment.
His scholarly research has appeared in the American Historical Review and Journal of American Ethnic History, among other publications.
Strawbridge is a University of Alabama graduate who went on to complete a master's degree at MSU in 2006. A scholar of 19th century Americana, the Civil War and Southern history, his research has been published in the Journal of Mississippi History and presented at meetings of the Alabama Association of Historians, University of Maryland Graduate Historical Conference and Mississippi Historical Society, among others.
The Marszalek Library Fund and Lecture Series was established in 2002 by MSU history professor emeritus John Marszalek and wife Jeanne, in collaboration with the MSU Libraries, to encourage use of primary source materials related to American history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jacksonian America, and race relations.
The series includes research papers presented by a university student and a lecture by a historian of national prominence. The library fund is used annually to purchase primary source materials for the campus library system.
For more information on the Marszalek Lecture Series and upcoming program, visit http://library.msstate.edu/content/templates/?a=580.
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