Recipient of richest prize in the humanities to speak at K-State

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News release prepared by: Beth Bohn, 785-532-6415, bbohn@k-state.edu

Friday, March 30, 2007

RECIPIENT OF RICHEST PRIZE IN THE HUMANITIES TO SPEAK AT K-STATE

MANHATTAN -- Native Kansan Eric Sundquist, Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles and a 2006 recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Service Award, will make a presentation at Kansas State University.

Sundquist, a scholar of multiculturalism, will present "Martin Luther King's 'Dream': Whose Country 'Tis of Thee?" at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, in the Hemisphere Room at Hale Library. The presentation, sponsored by K-State's department of English, is free and the public is invited.

The Mellon Foundation award, the richest prize in the humanities, is worth $1.5 million and is distributed over a three-year period.

Sundquist is a highly honored author and scholar. The former McPherson resident is the author of eight books dealing with American literature and culture, including "To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature." The book received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award and the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award.

Among Sundquist's other books include "Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America," "Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature," "Faulkner: The House Divided" and "The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction." He also has edited essay collections devoted to Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and W.E.B. DuBois.

Sundquist is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award in 1996 from the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and the 1995 UCLA College of Letters and Sciences Faculty Award. He served as general editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, "Studies in American Literature and Culture," from 1991-97. He also has served on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the national council of the American Studies Association.

Sundquist earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Along with teaching at UCLA, he has been on the faculties at the University of California at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University and at Northwestern University, where he was dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences from 1997 to 2002.