[367] PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR JARED DIAMOND WILL SERVE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 17, 2009
CONTACT: College of Liberal Arts, 615-494-7628

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR JARED DIAMOND WILL SERVE
AS 18TH ANNIVERSARY WINDHAM LECTURER AT MTSU ON APRIL 5
2009 Windham Lecture & Guest Reception Free & Open to Public

(MURFREESBORO)—Dr. Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been called one of the great minds of our time, will help MTSU‘s Windham Lecture Series celebrate its 18th anniversary by delivering this year's lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 16, in the State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building.
A reception for Diamond will be held at 5 p.m. that day in the Sun Trust Room of the BAS. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
Currently a professor of geography at UCLA, Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize for “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which was not only a popular best-seller but also the top-selling science book on Amazon.com for five years running. Most recently, “Collapse,” his follow-up book, landed on the major best-sellers lists as well and drawing critical reviews.
In “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Diamond explains the environmental and geographic reasons why certain human populations have flourished, and in “Collapse,” he uses the same factors to explore why ancient societies, including the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart.
With a breadth of interests and expertise areas that span from environmental history to evolutionary biology and molecular physiology, Diamond’s body of work has also been the subject of a PBS special, “Great Minds of Science: Evolution.”
Diamond, who also has authored two other best-sellers, “Why Is Sex Fun?” and “The Third Chimpanzee,” is the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards the world has to offer. He has received the MacArthur Foundation genius grant, the Conservation medals of the Zoological Society of San Diego (1993), the Carr Medal (1989) and Japan’s International Cosmos Prize (1998).
In 1999, President Bill Clinton bestowed the USA’s highest civilian award in science, The National Medal of Science, for Diamond’s landmark research and breakthrough discoveries in evolutionary biology. In 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in recognition of his tremendous contributions to the field of conservation biology.


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About the Windham Lecture Series

The Windham Lecture Series in Liberal Arts was established by William and Westy Windham through the MTSU Foundation. Dr. William Windham was a member of the MTSU faculty from 1955 to 1989 and served as chairman of the Department of History the last 11 years. Westy Windham (1927-1991) earned a master's degree in sociology at MTSU and was the founder of Great American Singalong.
The inaugural Windham Lecture in 1990 featured Drs. Dan T. Carter of Emory University and Dewey W. Grantham of Vanderbilt University, who spoke on “The South and the Second Reconstruction.” Since then, the Windham Lectures have addressed topics spanning from American music to presidential rhetoric to gambling to U.S. foreign policy, to name a few.
The Windham series is sponsored annually by the College of Liberal Arts, with the assistance of the assorted departments within the college.
• For more information, please contact the College of Liberal Arts at MTSU at 615-494-7628.



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ATTENTION, MEDIA—To secure a black-and-white jpeg of Jared Diamond for editorial use, please e-mail your request to Lisa L. Rollins in the Office of News and Public Affairs at MTSU at lrollins@mtsu.edu or call 615-898-2919.