2018 Peyton Lecture to feature award-winning author

Susan V. Donaldson

Author Susan V. Donaldson is the featured speaker for Randolph College’s spring 2018 Peyton Lecture. The event is scheduled Wednesday, March 28 at 8 p.m. in Nichols Theatre.

For the program, which is free and open to the public, Donaldson will present the lecture, “Southern Women Writers, Memory Wars, and the Cult of the Lost Cause.”

Donaldson is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, where she has taught since 1985. She is the author of Competing Voices: The American Novel, 1865-1914 (1998), which won a Choice “Outstanding Academic Book” award, and over fifty journal essays and book chapters, including, most recently, contributions to a special issue of Southern Cultures on The Help and Harriet Pollack’s collection on Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race. Donaldson is also co-editor with Anne Goodwyn Jones of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (1997). She is currently working on two books, one on the politics of storytelling, race, and visual culture in the U.S. South and the other on Mississippi writers and the demise of Jim Crow.

The Peyton Lecture is provided through a generous bequest of Ann Peyton ’54, in memory of Mabel Davidson, Elizabeth Ely Wright, and Willie Weathers.