A professor of English from Carnegie Mellon University will give a lecture as part of West Virginia University’s Jackson Distinguished Lecture Series at noon Monday, March 27, in the Blackwater Room of the Mountainlair.

Jeff Williams’lecture,The Pedagogy of Debt,will interrogatethe precipitous rise in student debtand the implications ofthe corporate university,especially in terms of labor and administration.

Williams will discuss a brief history of student debt, statistics of its dramatic rise in the past decade and how it represents a shift in conception of higher education, from public to private service. The talk will also speculate on the lessons thatenforced debt teaches about the public sphere, the market and the possibilities of a welfare state.”

He is the author ofTheory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition”andMetatheory: Narratives of Contemporary Criticism.He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them a Society for the Humanities Fellowship, the Norton Scholar’s Prize and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant.

The lecture is hosted by the Department of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

The Jackson Lecture Series is named for George Jackson, a prominent coal and gas developer from Clarksburg who established funding to provide support for programs within the College of Arts and Sciences as well as the Jackson Distinguished Chair of English.