'Abraham Lincoln of Illinois': Aurora University Program Feb. 27

AURORA, Ill.-Aurora University will host "Abraham Lincoln of Illinois," a lecture by Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson, on Wednesday, Feb. 27, at 7:30 p.m.

The program is free to the public in Perry Theatre in the Aurora Foundation Center for Community Enrichment at 1305 Kenilworth Place in Aurora.

Wilson's presentation is part of AU's 2007-2008 Celebrating Arts and Ideas series. Sponsors are MetLife and Nicor, Gold sponsors; Harris Aurora and Human Resource Management Systems, LLC, Silver sponsors; City of Aurora and Sikich, Bronze sponsors. Media support is provided by The Beacon News and Comcast.

Wilson is a George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English and co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. He will explore how Lincoln used his ability as a writer to help bring about his goals as president. 

Additionally, Wilson will discuss Lincoln's use of public letters to explain and defend his war powers--in particular his curtailment of civil liberties."This was of great concern to the public in his own time, and has troubled students of his presidency ever since," Wilson said.

A graduate of Doane College, Wilson earned Master's and Ph.D. degrees in English at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has taught English and American Literature for 33 years at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he also served as director of the Knox Library. 

A founder of an interdisciplinary American Studies program at Knox, he worked for many years in Jefferson studies, which resulted in the publication of numerous articles and several books. They include Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton University Press, 1989); and Thomas
Jefferson's Library (edited with James Gilreath, Library of Congress, 1989); and Jefferson Abroad (edited with Lucia Stanton, The Modern Library, 1999).

In 1994 he was appointed as the founding director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, a study center established by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in cooperation with the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Since retiring from Monticello in 1998, Wilson has been the George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Knox College, where he is co-director with Rodney O. Davis of the Lincoln Studies Center. 

The center was retained by the Library of Congress from 1999 through 2001 to transcribe and annotate important manuscripts from its Abraham Lincoln papers for the World Wide Web.

Wilson's work on Abraham Lincoln has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, American Heritage, Time, The American Scholar, and other magazines and scholarly journals, and has resulted in five books: Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on Lincoln's Illinois Years  (University of
Illinois Press, 1997);  Herndon's Informants: Letters and Interviews about Abraham Lincoln (1998) and Herndon's Lincoln (2006), both edited with Rodney O. Davis and published by the University of Illinois Press.

Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), won prizes from the Lincoln Group of New York, the New York Civil War Roundtable, the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and was awarded the Lincoln Prize for 1999.  

His latest book, Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), received the Lincoln Prize for 2007. Herndon's Lincoln, edited by Davis and Wilson, is the first volume in the Knox College Lincoln Studies Series publication series to be devoted to
Lincoln sources and published by the University of Illinois Press.  The second volume in the series will be a new, fully annotated edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates to be published in 2008. A comprehensive collection of William H. Herndon's letters, interviews, and lectures about Lincoln, is scheduled to be published in 2009.

Wilson has served as a consultant for the National Park Service's Lincoln Home, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and currently serves on advisory committees of a number of on-going Lincoln projects. They include the U. S. Bicentennial Commission, the Illinois State Bicentennial Commission, the Library of Congress's Bicentennial Exhibit, and the National
Trust's joint projects to restore the Lincoln Cottage at the Soldiers' Home and to create on the same site a multi-purpose institute on Lincoln's presidency. 

Reservations are requested. Call (630) 844-5486 or visit www.aurora.edu/artsandideas for more information.

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