Posted: Monday, February 26, 2018

Kristina L. Hochwender, will be the speaker for the University of Evansville Andiron Lecture on Wednesday, March 14. The lecture will begin at 4:00 p.m. in Eykamp Hall, Room 252, Ridgway University Center. This event is free and open to the public.

Hochwender’s topic will be “Child’s Play: Amusement and Reform in Annie Fellows Johnston’s Two Little Knights of Kentucky.”

Hochwender earned her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell College, and her Master of Arts and PhD from Washington University. Since 2007, she has taught literature at UE, where she also currently serves as the director of general education. She was recognized with the Dean’s Teaching Award in 2017. Along with her interest in children’s literature, her research centers on the Victorian clerical novel, and the ways in which the clergyman mediates national and religious identities and crises in novels that captured the Victorian imagination throughout the latter nineteenth century.

Evansville author Annie Fellows Johnston is best remembered for her Little Colonel novels, a series of girls’ books set in an idealized postbellum Kentucky. Published between 1895 and 1910, these novels spawned games, dolls, postcards, tourism, and a film starring Shirley Temple. They also inspired girls’ clubs, school dramas, and fundraising efforts. The second in the series, Two Little Knights of Kentucky, is notable for its presentation of the intersecting worlds of child and adult in response to a child’s first encounter with poverty.

The Andiron Lecture series is sponsored by the William L. Ridgway College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, call 812-488-1070 or 812-488-2589.

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