Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Wilmington, N.C. - Historian Barbara Fields will discuss "Race v. Racism: What's in a Word?" at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 23 in Dobo Hall 134 on the campus of University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Fields, a Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the American South. She holds a bachelors degree from Harvard University and a M. Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where she studied under C. Vann Woodward.

She was visiting editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her publications include Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press), which won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. She co-authored The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 1985), which won the Founders Prize of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal Government; Slaves No More: Three Essays on the Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992).

Her other awards and fellowships include a Michael Clark Rockefeller Fellowship at Harvard University, the George Washington Egleston Prize and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Yale University, where she was also a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow from 1992-1997. Fields was a featured commentator in the PBS documentary "The Civil War," and delivered the annual W.E.B. DuBois lecture series at Harvard University in 1995.

The talk is free and open to the public and sponsored by the History Teaching Alliance,

the UNCW College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History, and Cape Fear Community College.