Russell Lawson

American Professor Russell Lawson will make a bit of history when he steps up to a Canadian podium on Friday, Oct. 29.

His lecture will mark the dawn of a new era of international study at Brock, thanks to it being awarded a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair earlier this year.

Lawson, who is Brock’s first Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Transnational Studies, will present “The Messengers”, a lecture about indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes regions during the late 1700s/early 1800s.

Lawson is the first academic to visit Brock through the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program, a prestigious North American designation that will see a succession of U.S. scholars spend an academic year at Brock’s St. Catharines campus.

The Visiting Research Chair in Transnational Studies is a new interdisciplinary posting in which visiting scholars cover such fields as Canada-U.S. relations; First Nations cultures and languages; the history of the cross-border region; and the image of Canada abroad.

Lawson is visiting Brock from Bacone College in Muskogee, Okla. His lecture will focus on the beliefs, experiences, characteristics, motivations and assumptions of the Messengers. His working question is “what do the experiences of the Messengers tell us about the interaction/confrontation of cultures over time?”

A reception will follow the lecture. The event will be at 4 p.m. in Pond Inlet.

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