LANCASTER, Pa. - Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Larson will deliver Franklin & Marshall's annual North Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Bonchek Lecture Hall of Franklin & Marshall's new Barshinger Life Sciences and Philosophy Building. The lecture, sponsored by the college's Center for Liberal Arts and Society, is free and open to the public.
The North Lecture is named for the late Hugh M. North Jr., a prominent Lancaster attorney and financier, who died in 1929. His will provided a bequest to Franklin & Marshall "to be used in providing for lectures in law or allied subjects, to the students of Franklin & Marshall College, under the direction of the trustees." Larson is is the Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair at the School of Law at Pepperdine and the former Russell Professor of History and Talmadge Professor of Law at the University of Georgia and recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Before accepting a teaching position at Georgia in 1987, he served as associate counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor (1983-89) and as an attorney with a major Seattle law firm (1979-83). The author of five books and more than 80 published articles, Larson writes mostly about issues of science, medicine and law from an historical perspective. His books are Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (2004); Evolution's Workshop: God and Science in the Galapagos Islands (2001), Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (1995), Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (1985, 1989, and 2002 updated editions) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). His articles have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Atlantic Monthly, Science, Scientific American, The Nation, Oxford American, Wall Street Journal, Virginia Law Review, and British Journal for the History of Science. He is the co-author or co-editor of five additional books. The Fulbright Program named Larson to the John Adams Chair in American Studies for 2001; he received the 2000 George Sarton Award from the AAAS; and he participated in the National Science Foundation’s 2003-04 Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.
Larson lectures and speaks on history, law, science, and bio-ethics for academic,professional and public audiences. He has delivered endowed or funded addresses at dozens of colleges or universities and was commencement speaker at two universities. He has given papers at scores of academic conferences throughout the world, and legal and medical education talks to professional legal, judicial and medical groups across the country. He is interviewed frequently for broadcast and print media, including multiple appearances on PBS, the History Channel, Court TV, C-SPAN and CNN. His course on the history of evolution theory is available on audio and video The Teaching Company. Born in central Ohio, Larson attended Mansfield, Ohio, public schools. He earned a B.A. from Williams College, a law degree from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Larson received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the Ohio State University in 2004. The recipient of several teaching awards, he currently holds a joint appointment in the history department and law school at the University of Georgia, where he teaches the history of science to undergraduates and health, science and technology law to law students. He has also taught in Austria, China, France, New Zealand and the Netherlands. He is married to a pediatrician, Lucy Larson. They have two children, Sarah and Luke. Together, they enjoy travel, hiking, bicycling, and working on their 180-year-old house in Athens, Georgia. -30- |
