Emory Elliott, director of the Center for Ideas and Society and professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, who was recently appointed University Professor of the University of California, will deliver a lecture entitled, "Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age" at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, November 27 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building.

"Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age" is based upon a volume of essays of the same name that Emory Elliott has edited and that will appear in early 2002 from Oxford University Press. The lecture will explore some of the issues that the arts and humanities face within the context of our diverse and changing society and culture. It examines some of the controversies of the continuing "Culture Wars" and proposes some possible resolutions of intellectual conflicts that have damaged and continue to jeopardize the status and authority of the humanities within the academy and larger United States society.

Emory Elliott is University Professor of the University of California and Distinguished Professor of English at the Riverside campus. Since 1995, he has been the Director of UCR's Center for Ideas and Society. From 1972 to 1989, he was on the faculty of Princeton where he chaired the English Department and American Studies Program. His books include Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (1975), Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic (1982), and The Literature of Puritan New England (1994). He is the editor of The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), and the Prentice Hall Anthology of American Literature. He edited the American Novel Series for Cambridge University Press and Penn Studies on Contemporary American Fiction for The University of Pennsylvania Press. He has recently published a new "Introduction" and edition of The Oxford World Classics edition of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This event is cosponsored by the UCSB American Cultures Center, Department of English, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.