HISTORIAN KICKS OFF PRESIDENT'S LECTURE SERIES WITH COMPARISON OF CRUSADES AND 9/11
Historian Jonathan Riley-Smith of England's Cambridge University will kick off the 2002-03 Old Dominion University President's Lecture Series Thursday, Sept. 12, with a lecture, "Islam and the Crusades in History and Imagination, 8 November 1898 to 11 September 2001."
The Distinguished Presidential Lecture in History will be held at 8 p.m. in the auditorium of the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building on the university campus. It is free and open to the public.
The author of 15 books on the Crusades, including "The Oxford History of the Crusades," Riley-Smith is the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge and chair of the university's Center of Middle East and Islamic Studies. Among his recent publications is an article on religious violence.
He is a graduate of Eton College and Cambridge, where he has been a faculty member since 1972.
On Friday, Sept. 13, Old Dominion's history department will present a colloquium to encourage a dialogue on Riley-Smith's lecture. History faculty members Maura Hametz and Rowena Muzquiz will be joined by international studies professor Kurt Gaubatz for a frank discussion of religion and history in an international context. Riley-Smith will respond to their comments, and the floor then will be opened to the audience. The free colloquium will be held at 2 p.m. in room 1005 of Constant Hall.
Other President's Lecture Series speakers this fall include:
� Sept. 19, 8 p.m., Mills Godwin auditorium � Gordon L. Shaw, chairman of the board of the M.I.N.D. Institute, and professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Irvine. His major research interests use "music as a window into higher brain function." Research shows music enhances spatial-temporal reasoning and learning difficult math concepts. He is the author of "Keeping Mozart in Mind."
� Oct. 3, 8 p.m., north and center cafeterias, Webb University Center � Susan Sontag, an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, essayist and playwright. She also has written and directed four feature films. Sontag's lecture, "Regarding Other People's Pain: War and the Visual Arts," is part of the 25th annual Old Dominion University Literary Festival.
For more information about any of the lectures, call 683-3114. For more information on the colloquium, call 683-4107.