Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A nationally recognized literary scholar and authority on the modern civil rights movement will speak March 28 at Mississippi State University.
The free program featuring Rudolph P. Byrd is part of the 2010-11 lecture series organized by the university's African American Studies program.
Byrd's presentation, "Other Voices within the Veil: Marlon Riggs' Black Is . . . Black Ain't," will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Colvard Student Union's third-floor Fowlkes Auditorium.
A doctoral graduate of Yale University, Byrd is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies at Emory University and founding director of the Atlanta institution's James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies.
In addition to civil rights, his primary research areas include, among others, American and African American literature, folklore, philosophy, and gender studies.
The author of eight books, Byrd's latest work-in-progress includes editorship of the forth-coming Norton Anthology of African American Poetry and co-editorship, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of The Norton Edition of Cane. For more, visit www.aas.emory.edu/rbyrd.html.
The focus of his MSU program draws its title from the final documentary written, produced and directed by the late Marlon Riggs (1957-94), a Texas-born, Harvard-educated African American filmmaker, educator, poet, and gay rights activist.
For more information on Byrd's campus visit, contact Linda Joyce Miller at 662-325-0587 or lmiller@aas.msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.