This year’s O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities will be given by author Silas House on Friday, February 21, at 12:20 pm in the Guerry Center Reading Room. House’s most recent novel, Lark Ascending, won the 2023 Southern Book Prize for fiction; the novel will be the focus of his talk, “Keep Going: How to Find Hope in a Hopeless World.”
More info on the O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities:
The O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities is intended to acknowledge the tremendous work done by Dr. Gregory O’Dea in honors education at UTC for over 25 years. The O’Dea Lecture focuses on the humanities to ensure that we keep these concerns in the center of our university conversations. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ The Heart of the Matter, the humanities are “disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going.” The humanities generally include the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, and the arts.
More info on Silas House:
Silas House (photo by C. Williams)
Silas House is the nationally bestselling author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; and Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012, Southernmost (June 2018), and Lark Ascending (September 2022), as well as a book of creative nonfiction Something’s Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and three plays. Lark Ascending has been chosen as a Booklist Editor’s Choice, one of Salon’s favorite books of the year, one of Garden and Gun’s selections for Best Southern Books of 2022, and as a top ten most recommended book by independent booksellers across the entire nation in the monthly Indie Next List.
House was chosen for the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBT writer in the nation, and in 2020 he was chosen as the Appalachian of the Year in a nationwide poll and given the Artist Award by Governor Andy Beshear as part of the Governor’s Awards in the Arts. House serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, on the fiction faculty at the Naslund-Mann School of Creative Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, and as a series editor for Fireside Industries at the University Press of Kentucky. He is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and Spalding University. House, a native of Whitley County and Laurel County, Kentucky, now lives in Lexington.
