Lee Clark Mitchell, the Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, will discuss "Does Reading Good Books Make Us Any Better? Thoughts on an Ethics of Reading" at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus.
Mitchell, who received his bachelor's degree in English from Rochester in 1969, teaches courses in American literature, popular culture, and intellectual history. He is the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response, Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism, The Photograph and the American Indian, and Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film.
Mitchell also has edited Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for Oxford University Press, and his essays on American literature have appeared in The Henry James Review, American Literature, and Raritan.
Mitchell's lecture is presented in honor of the late Howard Horsford, who was professor emeritus of English. Horsford taught at the University from 1960 until his retirement in 1987.
The program is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Department of English at (585) 275-4092.