Valerie Smith, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, will headline the 11th annual West Virginia University Department of English Summer Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies from June 6-9.

The title for this year’s seminar is”History and Memory: Recollecting the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.”The public is invited to Valerie Smith’s public lecture Thursday, June 6, at 7:30 p.m. in the Rhododendron Room, WVU Mountainlair. A reception will follow.

Smith has written and edited a number of books on African American studies, literature and film. She is the author of Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative and Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings, and the editor of New Essays on Song of Solomon, Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video and African American Writers. At present she is co-editing a special issue of the feminist journal Signs with Marianne Hirsch entitled”Gender and Cultural Memory”and writing a book on memory and the Civil Rights Movement.

Scholars from universities and colleges across the country will gather on WVU ’s campus for the Seminar. Over four days, they will study literature and films that represent the Civil Rights Movement as well as examine theories of cultural memory and methods of writing history. Seminar participants will explore such issues as the relationship between individual memory and cultural history, strategies of representing memory; methods of writing history; the impact of changing constructions of race, gender and citizenship upon historical narratives; and the production of historical authority. One significant question that Smith will bring to bear on the seminar’s literature, film and historical texts is: what are the implications of narratives of the past for our present?

The seminar and public talk are sponsored by the WVU Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, call 304-293-3107 ext. 404.