Dr. Peter Midgley
MAGNOLIA – Dr. Peter Midgley, a scholar and a professional storyteller, will deliver the spring 2011 Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 11. The lecture will take place in Foundation Hall of the Donald W. Reynolds Campus and Community Center at Southern Arkansas University and is open to the public.
Midgley’s lecture is titled “Letting Go, Becoming Stone: It’s All a Name to Me.” Following a short lecture about oral traditions and storytelling and the influence of specific oral forms on his own work, he will perform two stories: one from the oral tradition and one of his own which reflects the influence of that tradition.
Midgley works as the senior editor at The University of Alberta Press. He has taught both Afrikaans and English at universities in South Africa, Namibia, and Canada. His scholarly works include Sol Plaatje: A Biography (1997); The Heroic Memory (2004), an edited volume of talks on Winston Churchill; The Diary of Iris Vaughan, co-edited with Peter Alexander (2004); and most recently, Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous South(ern) African Responses to Colonialism, 1850–1930 (2010), a collection of essays co-edited with Professors Peter Limb and Norman Etherington.
In September 2010, Midgley was the eighth Mackie Lake House writer-in-residence at Okanagan College, Vernon, British Columbia. He writes in both English and Afrikaans and his poetry has appeared in the South African journals Literator and New Coin. Some poems also appeared in The Story That Brought Me Here: To Edmonton from Everywhere. His bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek, appeared with Kalamalka Press in 2010. He is currently working on a second collection of poetry and a book-length creative non-fiction project, A Truce Stranger than Fiction: Reflections on Namibian Independence.
For more information on the Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture, contact Dr. Linda Tucker at (870) 235-4210.
