Athens, Ga. – A public conversation on “Lincoln,” an Academy Award-nominated 2012 film, will be held March 1 at 4 p.m. in Room 248 of the University of Georgia’s Miller Learning Center. The roundtable will bring together four UGA experts—on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and representations of the South—for a discussion of the movie and its implications.
The event is the latest in an ongoing series of Cinema Roundtables sponsored by the Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
The panel, composed of current and former Franklin College of Arts and Sciences faculty members, will initiate the discussion; the audience will be invited to participate with questions and observations. Richard Neupert, Wheatley Professor of the Arts and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre and Film, will serve as moderator. The panelists are Stephen Berry, Amanda and Greg Gregory Chair in Civil War History; John Inscoe, Albert B. Saye Professor of History and University Professor; Diane Batts Morrow, associate professor of history; and Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of sociology.
“Lincoln,” written by Tony Kushner and directed by Steven Spielberg, stars Daniel Day Lewis as the 16th president of the U.S. Set in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration to his second term but before the end of the Civil War, the film dramatizes the complex negotiations by Lincoln with a bitterly divided Congress that resulted in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery in the U.S.
“Lincoln” has already won scores of awards, including the American Film Institute’s Film of the Year, and “has received nearly unanimous praise for its elegant script, evocative soundtrack and stunning mise-en-scène,” Neupert said. “Its presentation of this tense moment in Civil War history continues to inspire close evaluation of its historical accuracy, political slant and cultural impact.”
The Willson Center Cinema Roundtable meets to discuss topics of film history, criticism and theory. Neupert, the coordinator of UGA film studies, organizes and moderates the roundtables.
Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
The Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts is a unit of the Office of the Vice President for Research. In the service of its mission to promote research and creativity in the humanities and arts, the Willson Center sponsors and participates in numerous public events on and off the UGA campus throughout the academic year. It supports faculty through research grants, lectures, symposia, publications, visiting scholars, visiting artists, collaborative instruction, public conferences, exhibitions and performances. For more information, see http://willson.uga.edu/.
