Loung Ung, an author and human rights activist who as a child in the 1970s survived the genocide by the Khmer Rouge in her native Cambodia, will give the inaugural Betty Jean Craige Lecture Jan. 29 at 4 p.m. in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall.
Craige is University Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and a former director of the Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
“Few have contributed more to the academic life of the University of Georgia than Betty Jean Craige,” said UGA President Jere W. Morehead. “After four decades of outstanding service to this institution, she continues to inspire the best in all of us. I am pleased that her long and distinguished career at UGA is being recognized through this lecture series.”
Ung’s talk, “First They Killed My Father,” also is the first lecture in the 2015 Global Georgia Initiative, a speaker series sponsored by the Willson Center, which has partnered with the comparative literature department to present this lecture.
Ung is the author of First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers; Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind; and Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing and Double Happiness. She is an international activist on a variety of human rights issues, including child soldiers, land mines, women and war and domestic violence.