Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard English professor Louis Menand is due at UC Davis on May 14 to deliver the Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture in Modern Culture and Thought.

Menand’s topic is “A Man is Shot: The Content of a Cinematic Technique,” about how the movies changed, from Breathless to Bonnie and Clyde.

History professor Michael Saler, who arranged Menand’s visit, said Menand “is renowned for his eclectic interests, interdisciplinary scholarship and ability to communicate to a wide audience in a witty and stimulating way.”

A reception is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. and the talk at 8 in Ballroom A at the Activities and Recreation Center. Admission is free and open to the public.

Lunn died in 1990 after a 20-year career in the UC Davis Department of History. Saler described Lunn as an esteemed teacher and mentor, and a distinguished scholar in the field of modern European intellectual history.

Lunn authored Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (1973) and Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (1982). Both focused on the relations of intellectuals to working people and to popular culture, and were widely acclaimed.

Menand won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history for his 2001 volume The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. He is now working on a cultural history of America in the 1950s.

His other recent works include American Studies (2002), The Future of Academic Freedom, editor (1997); Pragmatism: A Reader, editor (1996); The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism, co-editor (2000); and Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987).

He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of
Books.

All Seminars and Colloquia.