News release Public Information Office   SLU 10880   Hammond, LA 70402   phone: 985-549-2341   fax: 985-549-2061 publicinfo@selu.edu Spring 2004 news releases Public Information home News archive Contact: Christina Chapple Date: 2/17/04   BRITISH SCHOLAR TO LECTURE ON THE VICTORIANS AND SCIENCE AT SLU        HAMMOND -- Author Michael Wheeler will give a lecture on “Science, Religion, and the Search for Origins in Victorian Culture” at Southeastern Louisiana University on Thursday, Feb. 26.       The free public lecture, scheduled for 3:30 p.m. in the War Memorial Student Union Theatre, is sponsored by the Lyceum Arts and Lectures Committee and the departments of psychology and English.        Wheeler is director of the Gladstone Project and visiting professor at the Universities of Lancaster, Southampton, and Surrey Roehampton. He is the author of “Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology”; “Heaven, Hell and the Victorians”; and “Ruskin’s God,” all published by Cambridge University Press.         He was formerly a director of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University, where he led the construction of the  award-winning Ruskin Library to house the world's greatest collection of Ruskin material. He also was director of Chawton House Library, home of the Centre for the Study of Early English Women's Writing (1600-1830), with which the university is formally linked.        Educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University College, London, he has published extensively on Victorian fiction, the literature and theology of death and the future life, and Ruskin. He is a trustee of St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, and chairman of the Ruskin Society. He serves on the advisory boards of three international journals and is joint general editor of the Longman Literature in English series.       He has research interests in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literature and religion. He is joint general editor of a major new 10-volume edition of Jane Austen by Cambridge University Press, and currently writing a book on the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the literature of industrial England.       For additional information about the lecture, contact Matt Rossano, Department of Psychology, 985-549-5537 or mrossano@selu.edu.