GENESEO, N.Y. – Elizabeth Witherell, editor-in-chief of “The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau” (also known as the “Thoreau Edition”) will deliver this year’s Walter Harding Lecture Nov. 8 at SUNY Geneseo.
The lecture, titled “Thoreau’s Manuscripts and the Prepared Eye,” begins at 7:30 p.m. in the college’s Doty Recital Hall and is free and open to the public.
The “Thoreau Edition” currently comprises 17 volumes of a projected 28. Witherell is the project’s third editor-in-chief. Its first, from 1966-72 was the late Walter Harding, who taught at Geneseo from 1956-82 and for whom the Harding Lecture is named. In 2003, the “Thoreau Edition” was named “We the People” project by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has funded the project continuously since its inception.
In 2015, Witherell made news for her transcription of a nine-page manuscript of the collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library representing Thoreau’s notes on the 1850 shipwreck off Fire Island that killed the transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller.
Geneseo launched the annual Harding lecture in 2004 in honor of the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus, who was the world's leading scholar on Thoreau and founding secretary and former president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest international organization devoted to the study of any American author.
Harding's wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of Geneseo students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.
Media Contact:
David Irwin
College Communications
(585) 245-5529
Irwin@geneseo.edu