Professor Yuhl to Give "Last Lecture"

The Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture will continue its "Last Lecture" series on Thursday, April 22 at 8 p.m. in the Rehm Library with a lecture by Stephanie Yuhl, of the history department.

Funded by the Lilly Endowment Vocation Initiative, the pretext of the "Last Lecture" talks is that the speaker is about to retire and has been asked to sum up in a final lecture to students what they believe has made the work they've dedicated themselves to meaningful and worthwhile. Given a "last" chance, what's worth saying? What wisdom would be most important to pass on? What challenges have to go unfulfilled?

A member of the history department faculty since 2000, Yuhl specializes in 20th-century United States cultural and social history, public history, the history of the south, and American women.

She is the author of "'Rich and Tender Remembering:' Elite White Women and an Aesthetic Sense of Place in Charleston, 1920s and 1930s" in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and "The Legend is Truer than the Fact: The Politics of Representation in the Career of Elizabeth O'Neill Verner" for Perspectives on the Charleston Renaissance (University of Georgia Press, 2003). Her book, Golden Haze of Memory: History and the Making of Civic Identity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1920-1940 (University of North Carolina Press), is forthcoming in 2005.

Yuhl earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Georgetown University. Before joining the Holy Cross faculty, she taught for two years at Christ College at Valparaiso University in Indiana.

Yuhl lives in Worcester with her husband, Anthony Cashman, their children, Julia and Emmett, and their two dogs. The couple is expecting a third baby in June.