Month-long program to study Gaines, other Southern authors

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette announced that the Ernest J. Gaines Center, located on the third floor of the Edith Garland Dupré Library, is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Humanities Grant to hold a summer institute from May 30 to June 24 entitled “Ernest J. Gaines and the Southern Experience.”
This Institute will look at the work of Gaines and other contemporary Southern authors. Participants are to include professors from University of Georgia, John Wharton Lowe; Ohio University, Gary Edward Holcomb; University of California, Los Angeles, Richard Yarborough; Indiana State University, Keith Eldon Byerman; University of Pennsylvania, Herman Beavers and Thadious M. Davis; University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Marcia Gaudet; and Lycoming College, Maria Herbert-Leiter.
The professors will participate by leading academic discussions on the value of Gaines’s work in Southern, American and African American literary conversations.
The Ernest J. Gaines Center extends an invitation of application to all collegiate faculty and graduate students across the country. Deadline for applications is March 1.
The mission of the Ernest J. Gaines Center is to foster research and scholarship on the life and works of Dr. Ernest J. Gaines, to archive, house, preserve, protect and utilize the “Collection of Ernest J. Gaines,” and to make the collection available to scholars in perpetuity.