December 9, 2020, 6 p.m. Online only. Free and open to the public. Registration required.
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About the Lecture
The lecture will discuss the enduring value of the liberal arts to university life and American society. It will also establish the centrality of the ever-expanding Western literary canon to the liberal arts and how illiberal ideologies have weakened the free exchange of ideas and other essential elements of a truly inclusive educational community.
About the Speaker
Jon Parrish Peede, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has awarded more than $500 million in federal grants to cultural organizations and universities since 2017. His previous positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) at the University of Virginia, literature grants director at the National Endowment for the Arts, director of the NEA Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience program, director of the NEA Big Read program, and editor at Mercer University Press. He has written speeches for a U.S. president and a Librarian of Congress. Mr. Peede holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Mississippi. He is the coeditor of Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction and editor of a bilingual anthology of contemporary American fiction.