Lectures: Remembering the Great War
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| Annalise DeVries |
When: Sunday, November 12, 2017
Time: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Where: Central Library, Linn-Henley Research Library, Arrington Auditorium, 4th floor
Details: Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. For more information contact Jim Baggett at 205-226-3631 or jbaggett@bham.lib.al.us.
World War I transformed the region we know today as the Middle East, expanding some empires while others crumbled, creating new borders, and forging new political identities. Dr. Annalise J. K. DeVries of Samford University will examine accounts from Maadi-Tura, an Egyptian prisoner of war camp, to explain how the war experience created new points of conflict, particularly as the Ottoman Empire fell and the British and French looked to assert authority over the region.
DeVries is assistant professor of history at Samford University. She previously taught at the University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern College. Her professional interests include global and comparative history, imperialism, modern Egypt, the modern Middle East, and women’s and gender history. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation research, which looks at Cairo, Egypt’s cosmopolitan society in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This program is presented in cooperation with Auburn University, the Alabama World War One Centennial Committee, and the United States World War One Centennial Commission.
What: "Hearing a Different Drummer: William March's Novel Company K"
When: Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Time: 6:00-7:00 p.m.
Where: Central Library, Linn-Henley Research Library, Archives Department
Details: Free and open to the public. For more information contact Jim Baggett at 205-226-3631 or jbaggett@bham.lib.al.us.
Dr. Bert Hitchcock of Auburn University will discuss the often forgotten novel Company K. Written by Alabamian William March, a decorated Marine combat veteran, Company K is America's most powerful World War One novel. Courageously different in his outlook and strikingly innovative in technique, March has never received the full recognition he deserves. In its portrayal of the horrors and atrocities of war, Company K is among the best war fiction ever written.
Hitchcock retired from Auburn University in 2008, where he was the Hargis Professor of American Literature. A graduate of Auburn, he holds degrees from the University of Oregon and Duke University, and he also attended the University of Melbourne in Australia. From 1966 to 2008 Dr. Hitchcock held several positions, including assistant director of admissions, chairman of freshman English, and department head from 1977 to 1990. He regularly taught classes ranging from freshman survey classes to doctoral courses; his area of interest is nineteenth-century American literature and Southern literature.
Hitchcock's contributions to the study of American literature include the American Short Stories anthologies he edited for decades, and his entries and essays on American writers for a number of established reference books including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Reference Guide to American Literature, and Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. His books include De Remnant Truth, Down the River, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, and Chinaberries and Crows.
In 2008 Hitchcock’s former students helped establish the Bert Hitchcock Award in Southern Studies.
Generous financial support for these programs is provided by the Rita C. Kimerling Family Fund.
This program is presented in cooperation with Auburn University, the Alabama World War One Centennial Committee, and the United States World War One Centennial Commission.
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