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Professor of English at the University of Virginia and prize-winning scholar, Dr. Mark Edmundson will deliver the annual Flora Plonsky Levy Lecture in the Humanities on UL Lafayette’s campus on Wednesday, April 14 at 7:00 p.m. at the Hamilton Hall Auditorium.

The lecture is entitled “Freud's Heroism.” This year’s lecture is dedicated to the memory of Jewell Parkerson Lowe for lifetime dedication to serving others through the establishment of the Southwest �޻���ֱ�� Education and Referral Center / 232-HELP.

Edmundson sees Freud as man of great courage. “Freud was,” Edmundson would have us understand,“ without doubt, a brave man. He proved that time and time again, especially in the late phase of his life, when he was confronted by Nazi barbarism.”

In this forthcoming lecture on the heroic life of Freud, Edmundson will address certain questions which might arise in our minds: “In which sense was Freud a hero as such?” “Was it in his thinking, which was revolutionary and groundbreaking?” “How can we view him as assuming a heroic stance in the modern world?” “And after Freud—and Shakespeare who influenced him so much—can we still believe in heroes in our world of postmodernity?”

Edmundson has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper’s, where he is a contributing editor. The Death of Sigmund Freud, published in August 2007 and in paperback in August 2008, is a dramatic narrative of Freud’s last two years, when he fled Nazi-occupied Vienna for London.

The Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities was endowed by the late Flora Plonsky Levy in 1980. As a patron of the arts and the humanities, Miss Levy willed that her entire estate was dedicated solely for two purposes: the first was the hosting of an annual lecture in which any scholar, poet, philosopher, scientist, or artist, nationally or internationally achieved in the traditional humanities, would be invited to deliver a lecture sharing his/hers most original thought and work as of the moment. Over the past years, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Coles, Walker Percy, Sophie Freud, Bruno Bettelheim and Peter Gay have delivered the Levy Lectures in the Humanities.

The second purpose of Miss Levy’s endowment was for the establishment of a journal, which again was dedicated to the traditional humanities and from which Explorations was established. The avowed hope of Flora Levy was that the university and the community, through the medium of the lectureship, would make contact with the most creative and intellectually accomplished minds of our culture and of the world.