Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture: Elizabeth Ellis
Galloway, N.J. – The Master of Arts in American Studies program will host the 15th annual Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture Series on Thursday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Theatre.
This year’s speaker is Elizabeth Ellis, an associate professor of History at Princeton University. Ellis’ research centers on Indigenous migration, borderlands, early Native American art and 20th-century Native American politics.
The title and description of her talk are forthcoming.
About Paul Lyons
Paul Lyons was a professor of Social Work in the School of Social & Behavioral Sciences. He became a faculty member in 1980 and published five books during his career, including “Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956” (1982) and “Class of ’66: Living in Suburban Middle America in 1994” (1996). Lyons also played the saxophone and clarinet, which led to him organizing “Profapalooza,” a 2009 fundraising concert and faculty member performance at the House of Blues in Atlantic City.
The University (then college) established the lecture series with American historian Eric Foner of Colombia University as its inaugural speaker in 2010, a year after he passed. Robert Gregg, then dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, discussed Lyons’ legacy prior to the lecture series in 2010.
"What struck one about Paul was the range of his accomplishments and the breadth of his interests. He was the quintessential Stockton faculty member, one who embraced the ideas of interdisciplinary study and exploration.”
Annual Talk Explores Gender, Race in Colonial America
April 11, 2024
Galloway, N.J. — There are niche topics within colonial American studies and gender & sexuality studies. However, few are quite as shocking as the subject of this year’s Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture.
Greta LaFleur, an associate professor and director of Graduate Studies for the American Studies program at Yale University, analyzed how castration was used as both gender affirmation and capital punishment as part of the Wednesday, April 12 lecture in the Campus Center Theatre.
They began the conversation by providing context for their research, specifically exploring the history of gender, sexuality, race and science.
In researching historical documents and materials for their upcoming book, LaFleur found local newspaper clippings and periodicals that either sensationalized self-castrations of men in colonial Connecticut or described criminal cases of enslaved Black men who were either forcibly or voluntarily castrated in lieu of being executed during criminal trials.
“My major claim today is that these complex and very different archives surrounding 18th-century castrations, both willed and unwilled, have something to teach us about emergent understandings of the relationship between gendered presentation and physical embodiment,” LaFleur said.
