NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Best-selling author John M. Barry will speak Thursday, Nov. 30, at Ingram Hall at the Blair School of Music on the Vanderbilt University campus.
Barry is best known for The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, which examines the 1918 pandemic with a death toll of 50 to 100 million worldwide. This compelling and timely book was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show “Bird Flu: The Untold Story” in January 2006 and won the 2005 Keck Award from the National Academies of Science for the outstanding book on science or medicine of the year.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Barry was asked by the Louisiana Congressional delegation to chair a bipartisan group on flood control. A recognized expert on the Mississippi River, he wrote Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, which raised public awareness of the impact of catastrophic flooding, and was co-originator of RiverSphere, a project of Tulane University on the New Orleans Mississippi riverfront that will be the first facility in the world dedicated to comprehensive river research.
Barry is a member of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health advisory board, the 2006 Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecturer about Hurricane Katrina, and has written for Fortune, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Esquire and the Washington Post.
Barry is currently the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier Universities and divides his time between New Orleans and Washington, D.C.
The event will begin at 6 p.m., preceded by a complimentary reception at 5 p.m. in Ingram Hall. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required, but seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-seated basis. Parking will be available in South Garage at 24th Avenue South and Children‘s Way.
Video of the lecture will be Webcast from VUCast, Vanderbilt‘s news network, www.vanderbilt.edu/news.
The speech is part of the 2006-2007 Chancellor‘s Lecture Series. The Chancellor‘s Lecture Series serves to bring to Vanderbilt and the wider Nashville community intellectuals who are shaping the world today. For more information about the Chancellor‘s Lecture Series, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/cls.
Media Contact: Melissa Pankake, (615) 322-NEWS
melissa.r.pankake@vanderbilt.edu