Critic and writer Louis Menand is Olin speaker on campus April 22

"Love and Duty in the Cold War" is the title of critic, essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Louis Menand's Olin lecture, on Tuesday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall, Auditorium D.

The annual talk, which is endowed by the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation and sponsored by the Graduate School, is free and open to the public, but space is limited and tickets are required. They may be obtained from the Willard Straight Ticket Office or the Graduate School, 350 Caldwell Hall. For further information, contact Kat Empson at 255-5235 or kle6@cornell.edu.

Menand

A staff writer at The New Yorker, frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and former editor at The New Republic, Menand is the author of The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), which won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished book on the history of the United States in 2002 as well as the Francis Parkman Prize for the best book in American History in 2002 from the Society of American Historians. A distinguished professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Menand also is the editor of The Future of Academic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

The Metaphysical Club traces American ideas from the end of the Civil War to the post-World War I era through the story of a group of 19th century American intellectuals who met informally in Cambridge, Mass., in 1872. The club's members were Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the great legal mind of his time; William James, father of modern American psychology (and brother to the novelist Henry James); and Charles Sanders Peirce, scientist, logician and pioneer semiotician. Their ideas and writings, which developed during the period of upheaval following the U.S. Civil War, influenced theories of Peirce's student, the philosopher and educator John Dewey, on the importance of pragmatism, experiment and experience in learning. They also led to the 1919 Supreme Court decision in Abrams v. U.S., which is the basis for the modern law of free speech.

In his popular journalism pieces, Menand has written about contemporary ideas and their history in everything from "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" to U.S. higher education to Edmund Wilson's magnum opus To the Finland Station, on revolutionary politics, people and thought from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik upheaval.

The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Lecture Series began at Cornell in 1986. Previous Olin lecturers have included Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould and Jane Goodall.