Retired R-MC Professor to be Featured Speaker

Professor Ritchie Watson

Retired Randolph-Macon College Professor Ritchie Watson Jr. will be the featured speaker at the Hanover Tavern on Wednesday, November 17, 2010. Watson will discuss his recent book, Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. and it is free and open to the public.

In conjunction with the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Watson will discuss the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issues of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences –differences that made civil war inevitable.

Watson joined the faculty of R-MC in 1970. In 1998, he was awarded the A. G. Ingram Professorship in English. Additional honors include the Samuel Nelson Gray Distinguished Professor Award in 1992, the United Methodist Church Exemplary Teaching Award in 1993 and the student-selected Thomas Branch Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1986 and 1992. He traveled to the former Yugoslavia in 1989 as a Fulbright Scholar to teach American literature at Edvard Kardelj University of Ljubljana.

Watson, who retired from R-MC in 2008, earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Watson is also the author of The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction and Yeoman Verses Cavalier.

For directions to the Hanover Tavern, visit http://hanovertavern.org/contact/map-directions