Campus Life

UWF Downtown Lecture Series presents Dr. Allen Josephs

The University of West Florida College of Arts & Sciences will host UWF Professor of English and World Languages, Dr. Allen Josephs, as guest speaker for the upcoming UWF Downtown: A Lecture Series Honoring the Arts and Humanities event. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 9 at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, located at 40 S. Alcaniz in Pensacola.

Refreshments will be served at 5:30 p.m., followed by Joseph’s presentation, “The Quest for God in the Road,” at 6 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

After more than 40 years of writing on Hemingway and Spanish culture, Josephs has turned his attention to one of our greatest living novelists, Cormac McCarthy, whose Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel is this year’s “common read” at UWF. In this presentation Josephs will examine the presence and the absence of God in McCarthy’s last and most compelling novel. His essay, “The Quest for God in The Road” – on which this presentation will be based – appeared this year in theCambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Editor Steven Frye has called Josephs’ treatment “definitive.”

Josephs is an internationally renowned Hemingway scholar and past president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. His new collection, On Hemingway and Spain: Essays and Reviews, 1979-2013, will be published by Newstreet Communications this fall.

He is the author of nine books and more than a hundred essays and reviews published in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Virginia Quarterly Review and many others in the U.S. and abroad. His last book, Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida, won four prizes and had its initial presentation at IHMC in 2002.

Founded in 2012, UWF Downtown is a four-part lecture series hosted by the UWF College of Arts and Sciences, which promotes the value of the liberal arts in contemporary life. It showcases outstanding teacher scholars who serve the community as UWF faculty, as well as scholars of national prominence who amply illustrate the essential role of the liberal arts in building and sustaining contemporary culture.