Diversity Week Lecture Series Features Civil War, Vietnam War and Zora Neale Hurston

– Florida Tech presents a Martin Luther King Day and Zora Neale Hurston Festival commemorative lecture series with three January presentations. The
lectures, at 7 p.m. in the F.W. Life Sciences Building ground floor auditorium, are open to the general public at no cost.

On Jan. 20, Dr. Robert Taylor, Florida Tech associate professor of humanities, presents, “Burying Poindexter Williams: Twice a Hero.” The Williams story
concerns a dead Vietnam veteran whose place of burial involves racial discrimination. Taylor is recipient of the 2002 Charlton Tebeau Award for Best Book
in Florida History for Florida in the Civil War, published by Arcadia Press in 2001. He has authored three other books on the Civil War or the South.

On Jan. 23, Dr. Edward Baptist, Charlton W. Tebeau Assistant and Professor of History at the University of Miami, will deliver “Antebellum Florida.”
Baptist earned a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests include the history of the United States,
especially the South. His book, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War was published in 2002.

On Jan. 24, Dr. Carla Kaplan, professor of English, gender studies and American and Ethnic studies at the University of Southern California, will present,
“Zora’s Florida.” Among the works Kaplan has authored or edited, is the recently published Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letter, which she edited.

Presented by Florida Tech’s humanities and communication department, the series is made possible through the generous support of the Krieger Publishing
Company in Malabar and the Florida Tech Campus Activities Board. Professor Gordon Patterson is the series director. For more information, call Marilyn
Goravitch at (321) 674-8073.