Speakers are recognized authorities and scholars from a wide range of backgrounds who lecture to and meet with students and faculty. Notable past lecturers include news commentator William F. Buckley, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, famed authors Alex Haley and Tom Wolfe, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

2003-2004 Speakers

2003-2004 Schedule of Lectures

James McBride Tuesday, September 16 7 P.M. Berry College Chapel

James McBride is an award-winning writer, composer and saxophonist. His memoir, The Color of Water, spent two years on the New York Times Bestseller List and has become an American classic. The book is an autobiographical account of his mother, a white Jewish woman from Poland who raised 12 black children in New York City and sent each to college.

His Miracles at St. Anna, which the Baltimore Sun called a "searingly, soaringly beautiful novel," has been dubbed "a lyrical, touching fable about the miraculous power of love" by Publisher's Weekly. The book is the story of a black American soldier who befriends a six-year-old Italian boy during World War II.

McBride is a former staff writer for the Boston Globe, People and the Washington Post; his work has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Rolling Stone. He is the recipient of the 1997 Anisfield Wolf Book Award as well as several awards for his work as a composer in musical theatre.

His lecture at Berry is co-sponsored by the Freshman Center. This year's incoming freshmen read McBride's The Color of Water in the Freshman Book Dicussion Program.

Dorothy Allison Friday, October 17 8 P.M. Berry College Chapel

The keynote speaker in Berry's 2003 Southern Women Writers conference, Dorothy Allison has been proclaimed "one of the finest writers of her generation" by the Boston Globe.

Her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was one of five finalists for the 1992 National Book Award and won both the Ferro Grumley and Bay Area Book Reviewers awards for fiction. A movie version of the novel premiered on Showtime in 1996. Allison's second novel, Cavedweller, was a New York Times bestseller.

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, a chapbook of her performance work, was selected as a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review. The documentary titled "Two of Three Things and Nothing for Sure" took prizes at the Aspen and Toronto film festivals and premiered on PBS in 1998.

Allison's works also include Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature, a collection of her essays, speeches and performance pieces; Trash, a collection of short stories; and two editions of poetry, both titled The Women Who Hate Me.

Allison is a member of the board of PEN International and serves on the advisory board of the National Coalition Against Censorship, Feminists for Free Expression and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award.

Elaine Pagels Postponed due to illness New date to be announced Berry College Chapel

An intensely inquisitive and thorough historian, Elaine Pagels is one of the country's leading scholars of religion. While still in her early thirties, she exploded the myth of the early Christian church as a unified movement and changed the historical landscape of one of the world's greatest religions in the process.

Pagels, who serves as the Harrington Spear Paine professor of religion at Princeton University, gained international acclaim for her best-selling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an anlysis of 52 ancient manuscripts unearthed in Egypt in 1945. The manuscripts, known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, include many gospels and other writings previously unknown and demonstrate that the early Christian movement was far more diverse than previously thought.

Pagels also wrote Adam, Eve and the Serpent, a book that explores the Genesis creation stories and their role in the development of sexual attitudes in the Christian West - as well as the conviction, fundamental to American political life, that "all men are created equal."

Her other works include The Origin of Satan, which reflects on the many ways that various religions have given imaginative form to what is invisible, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

Lawrence Krauss Thursday, March 25 7:30 P.M. Berry College Chapel

Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally renowned theoretical physicist, whose varied research interests range from cosmology and the nature of the universe to the origin of all mass to the science of Star Trek.

He is the author of several acclaimed popular books, including The Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, which was named Astronomy Book of the Year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; Fear of Physics; the national besteller The Physics of Star Trek; Beyond Star Trek; Missing Mass; and Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth ... and Beyond.

Krauss serves as the Ambrose Swasey professor of physics, professor of astronomy, and chairman of the department of physics at Case Western Reserve University. He has received numerous professional honors including the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 1999-2000 Award for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology, the Julius Edgar Lilienfield Prize of the American Physical Society (for contributions to the understanding of the early universe) and the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award for Atom.

An acclaimed teacher and lecturer, Krauss is well-known for his ability to reach out to popular audiences. He has delivered public lectures at such places as the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Natural History in New York. He has been named a Sigma Xi natinal lecturer and an American Physical Soceity Centennial lecturer.

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Previous Years: 2002-03