Professor Philip Gura to give annual literary lecture

LAWRENCE — A renowned scholar in early American literature will present “‘I’ or ‘We’: Placing the Self in Antebellum U.S. Literature and Culture” for the 2015 Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture at the University of Kansas.

The event, sponsored by the Department of English, will be 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in the Centennial Room in the Kansas Union. It is free and open to the public.

Philip Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently published the first scholarly biography of William Apess (1798-1839), a foundational figure in Native American literature and political life. Titled “The Life of William Apess, Pequot,” the book has been heralded by Publishers Weekly as "engaging, insightful, and thoroughly detailed . . . bring[ing] Apess more fully to life."

Gura is also the recent author of “Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel,” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013; the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “American Transcendentalism: A History,” Hill and Wang 2007, and “Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical,” Hill and Wang 2005.

Gura’s many honors include the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Modern Language Association in 2008 and the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society.