Cultural Warrior Larry Levine to Speak At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Larry Levine, major historian, public intellectual and cultural provocateur, will present the 1997 Capen Lecture in the Humanities at the University at Buffalo on Tuesday, Sept. 30.

The lecture, titled “The Search for American Identity,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. Sponsored by the Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture (Bruce Jackson) and the Faculty of Arts and Letters, it will be free and open to the public.

Levine is the author of “The Opening of the American Mind” (1996), a politically powerful history of the university in American society. It was written in response to the spate of right-wing books published in recent years that attack the contemporary university and blame educators for a pernicious decline in American culture.

In his book, subtitled “Canons, Culture and History,” Levine offers what many critics have called the first reasoned exploration of the explosive conflicts over the university, the canon, and, fundamentally, the meaning of being "American” that have come to be called “the culture wars.”

His portrait of American culture is a vivid and decidedly alternative one that presents an eloquent defense of the “opening up” of the American university and American education in general to a broad range of ideas and perspectives that have extended and redefined the intellectual canon.

Levine holds a doctorate from Columbia University. He is a professor of history and cultural studies at George Mason University in Virginia and Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has received many professional and academic awards. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1994-95.

He also is the author of several books, journal articles and book chapters on such subjects as the national temper, cultural history and hierarchy, and books, and on Black culture and consciousness.