Looks like I wrote about a lecture break too early! As of today I’m lined up to give four more public lectures next semester:
February 21: Every year our History Department hooks up with a visiting professor, and this year it’s Kelly DeVries of Loyola Marymount. Kelly is a medievalist, specializing in military history (which is all kinds of cool), and he’s also a bit of a star in our little academic world: he’s a regular expert on History, Discovery, National Geographic, and other such educational programming. Anyway, he and I will be giving a joint lecture on the topic of Robin Hood. We’re still working out the details, but we’ll either be talking about the depictions of Robin or the historical origins of him. Or both. We’ll see.
March 14: My recent Phi Kappa Phi lecture on Tolkien and Beowulf was enough of a hit — apparently it was one of the biggest crowds they’d had in recent memory, which is fun — that I’ve been asked to do a bigger, more formal encore. This time it’ll be in the evening, complete with refreshments, and sponsored by the Friends of the Daniel Library. I also hope that this time I won’t be losing my voice.
April 20-22: I’ll be at JordanCon IV in Atlanta, where at some point I’ll be giving a major lecture about Robert Jordan and mythology. There’s a decent chance I’ll do some additional speaking, sitting on panel discussions and the like, but that’s yet to be determined.
May 10-13: I’ll be at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, where at some point I’ll be giving a run-of-the-mill conference paper (no big lecture this time!) on the poet John Gower and his quiet resentment of the Lancastrian crown.
There’s also a decent chance I’ll be going to another academic conference at the end of March (this one on the Honors Program side of things), but my attendance is not certain right now. If I do go, however, I will not be giving a lecture!
Michael,
Hello from Milwaukee! Any chance that either of your first two presentations will be available via webcast? I would love to hear your discussion on Tolkein and Beowulf.
-Robert D. Steele
@Robert I know of no plans to have them made “live,” though it might be something I could chat with the IT department about. To my knowledge they’ve never done anything like that, but they might be keen to try.
Glad you’re interested in it, though. Sounds to me like somebody just needs to bring me up to Wisconsin to give some lectures!