‘The Americanization of Francis Lieber’ topic of annual lecture April 16

Dr. Hartmut Keil, a visiting research fellow with the Institute for Southern Studies, will deliver the annual Francis Lieber lecture Thursday, April 16, at the University of South Carolina.

The lecture, titled “The Americanization of Francis Lieber,” will take place at 4 p.m. in Gambrell Hall, Room 152. It is free and open to the public. Keil is a professor of American Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and former director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Lieber was a professor at South Carolina College between 1837 and 1856. Keil said he was among America’s leading minds in the fields of law and politics and is best known for the “Lieber Code,” which in 1863 laid down conventions governing conduct during war and served as an influential precedent for the Geneva Conventions. He said that few people understood the horrors of civil war better than Lieber, who had many close friends who lived in the South and the North and whose three sons fought on both sides.

The annual Francis Lieber Lecture is sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies, the Walker Institute for International and Area Studies and the department of history in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, contact Dr. Don Doyle at 803-777-5195 or via e-mail at doyledh@mailbox.sc.edu.