Events

LEXINGTON, Ky.—Hollywood writer and director Robby Henson will screen “Pharaoh’s Army,” Friday, April 29, at 2:30 p.m. in Transylvania University’s Cowgill Center. The Civil War film stars Academy Award winner Chris Cooper as Union Army Captain John Hull Abston and Academy Award nominees Patricia Clarkson and Kris Kirstofferson. Henson wrote and directed the film, which chronicles a Yankee raiding party’s confrontation with a Confederate mountain woman and her son in Kentucky. Shot on location near Danville, Ky., and in the Red River Gorge, the film focuses on the region’s unique divisions during the Civil War and is based on true events from 1862. In his presentation following the screening, Henson, originally from Danville, will speak about how oral history transitions into film. The event is part of the celebration of the inauguration of R. Owen Williams as Transylvania’s 25th president and is free and open to the public.

LEXINGTON, KY.—President R. Owen Williams announced today the creation of the John Marshall Harlan Lecture Series at Transylvania University, made possible by the generosity of McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, PLLC.  Harlan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877-1911, was a Kentucky lawyer and politician and an 1853 graduate of Transylvania’s law department. An early champion of civil rights, he is most notable as the lone dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which, respectively, struck down as unconstitutional federal anti-discrimination legislation and upheld Southern segregation statutes. There are intriguing coincidences—one involving Harlan—between Williams’s scholarly interests and the history of Transylvania. His Yale dissertation, “Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and the First Civil Rights Movement, 1857-1883,” has Justice Harlan as one of its primary protagonists. “John Marshall Harlan is my hero and the central figure in my dissertation,” Williams said. “So I felt as if there were a spiritual connection between Transylvania and me even before coming here.” Transylvania will launch the series this fall. William Wiecek, legal and constitutional historian and professor of public law and legislation at Syracuse University, will give the inaugural Harlan Lecture on September 26, followed by a spring 2012 lecture presented by Akhil Reed Amar, professor of law and political science at Yale University. “We created this lecture series to bring to campus highly esteemed legal figures of national or international prominence who have

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