UC Berkeley Professor Samuel Otter to Present 2007 Oberlin Lectures in English and American Literature

February 20, 2007 -- University of California at Berkeley Associate Professor Samuel Otter will present the 2007 Oberlin Lectures in English and American Literature. Otter will give three talks in the series "Philadelphia Stories: Experiments in Freedom, 1790-1860" and a final presentation "Moby Dick and the World We Live In.” All lectures are free and open to the public and will take place in Craig Lecture Hall.

• February 26, 7:30 p.m.: "Fever: Narratives of Race and Conduct During the Yellow
   Fever Epidemic of 1793"
  
• February 27, 7:30 p.m.: "Condition' and 'Complexion': debates about History, Character,
   and Disenfranchisement in the 1830s"
  
• March 1, 7:30 p.m.: "Freedom: Social Violence and Literary Scene in Webb's 'The Garies and their Friends' (1857) and Melville's 'Benito Cereno' (1855)"),
  
• March 2, 4:30 p.m.: "Moby Dick and the World We Live In: Literary Scripture and American Political Crisis"

A member of the English department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990, Otter’s research and teaching focus on 19th Century United States literature. In recent years, he has taught courses on Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, racial representation in the 19th century, literature and social reform, the American short story, and British and American poetry in the nineteenth century.

He has published Melville’s Anatomies (1999), which was awarded the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best work in Melville studies, and he is currently working on Philadelphia Stories, in which he examines the compelling narrative about race, character, manners, and violence that unfolds across a range of texts written in and about Philadelphia between 1790 and 1860.

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Media Contact:

Scott Wargo
Director of Media Relations
Oberlin College
440-775-5197

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