New Lecture Series Scheduled At Williams College

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Jan. 3, 2001 — “America at Home and Abroad,” a new lecture series at Williams College will begin Wednesday, Jan. 10 with Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, a monthly review of the arts. He will speak on “The Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde.” The lecture will be held in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m.

Since 1987, Kramer has been the art critic for the weekly New York Observer, and his “Media Watch” column was published weekly in The NewYork Post from 1993 until 1997. He has also been the editor of Arts Magazine, and the art critic of The Nation. In 1965 he joined the staff of the New York Times, and was appointed chief art critic in 1973, a position he held until his resignation to become the editor of The New Criterion, which he founded with Samuel Lipman in 1982.

He is the author of “The Age of the Avant-Garde,” “The Revenge of the Philistines,” and “The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War.”

The new lecture series, led by Professors Michael Lewis and James McAllister, is underwritten by the J.M. Olin Foundation Speaker Fund. The series will bring speakers who, in addition to their public lecture, will also engage students in seminar-style format in a dialogue about their work.

For more information, contact Elissa Shevinsky at (413) 597-6019.

END