9/26/06 Contact: Deedie Dowdle, (334) 844-9999 (ddowdle@auburn.edu)
Mike Clardy, (334) 844-9999 (clardch@auburn.edu)

VISITING SPEAKER AT AU TO DISCUSS URBAN SPRAWL

AUBURN - Historian and author Kenneth T. Jackson will discuss the impact of suburban sprawl on Thursday as the first speaker in this year’s Littleton-Franklin Lectures in Science and Humanities at Auburn University.

In the 4 p.m. public lecture, Jackson will speak on “The Road to Hell: Transportation Policy, Suburbanization and the Decline of the United States” in the auditorium of the Sciences Laboratory Center in the College of Sciences and Mathematics complex. The title of the lecture is taken from a book in progress by the Columbia University professor.

Known as an urban historian, Jackson specializes in American social and urban history. He is director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for the Study of American History and the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia.

Jackson is the author of “Crabgrass Frontier,” an examination of factors influencing the development of suburbs in the United States, and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and has been on the faculty at Columbia since 1968.

Three other speakers will be featured in the 2006-07 academic year as part of the lecture series. Roald Hoffmann, a 1981 Nobel Prize-winning chemist, will speak on Oct. 24, and medical anthropologist and author Alondra Oubré will speak on Feb. 27. The series will close with L. Hunter Lovins on April 17. Lovins is president of Natural Capitalism Inc. and co-founder of the California Conservation Project.

All the lectures will be at the Sciences Laboratory Center auditorium. Sponsored since 1968 by the John and Mary Franklin Foundation of Atlanta, the series also recognizes the services of Mosley Professor Emeritus Taylor D. Littleton, who directed the lecture series for many years.

For more information on the Littleton-Franklin Lectures, click on http://www.auburn.edu/franklin/site/.

Auburn University is a preeminent land-grant and comprehensive research institution with more than 23,500 students and 6,500 faculty and staff. Ranked among the top 50 public universities nationally, Auburn offers more than 230 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs.

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