Associate Professor Michael Trotti will give the Robert Ryan Professor of the Humanities Lecture on Tuesday, April 27, at 4pm in Clark Lounge, Campus Center. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, is titled "An Obituary for the Era of Lynching: Race and Violence in the Postbellum South Reconsidered"
Michael Trotti, author of The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South (2008), has held the position of Robert Ryan Professor of the Humanities for the last three years. This talk will center upon legal and extralegal violence in the American South after the Civil War, placing lynching in a broader context of racial murder. He argues that we are only beginning to understand the extent of southern racial violence in this era. By segregating the study of lynching from other forms of racial killing, we have misinterpreted the place of racial violence in the South.
The Robert Ryan Professorship in the Humanities was established in 2001 as a part of a bequest from professor emeritus Robert Ryan, who passed away in 2000 after teaching for 42 years in the history department at Ithaca College. Professor Ryan's career was distinguished by his dedication to students, his integrative vision of the humanities, and his continuing commitment to intellectual renewal.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20100420142039989