Author and professor Elliott Gorn to speak on “The Ghost of Emmett Till”

North Central College welcomes author Elliott Gorn as guest lecturer on the subject “The Ghost of Emmett Till” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 23, in the College’s Harold and Eva White Activities Center.

Gorn, one of the nation’s foremost scholars of American urban, cultural and social history, is the Joseph Gagliano Professor of American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago. His talk will focus on Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager from Chicago whose 1955 brutal murder in Mississippi helped spur the modern civil rights movement.  

Gorn has authored four major books on Mother Jones, John Dillinger, American sports and bare-knuckle boxing. He also has edited eight volumes and published and reprinted more than 50 articles in a wide variety of scholarly and media publications. With an interdisciplinary focus on urban and American culture, Gorn has taught courses at Loyola on the history of sports, Chicago, masculinity and gender, film, war in American culture, biography and autobiography, and the United States survey.

Previously, he taught at Brown University, Purdue University, Miami University of Ohio and the University of Alabama. He has served as the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in North American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland (2009-2010); the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (2005-2006); a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (1997-1998); a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library (1993-1994); an Irish American Cultural Institute Fellow (1993); an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1988-1989); and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (1984-1985).

The recipient of Miami University’s Distinguished Educator Award and the Effective Educator Award, Gorn has been recognized as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians since 2003.

Gorn received his Ph.D. from Yale University and his A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley.

For more information about this free event, presented by the College’s Cultural Events program and history department, contact Ann Durkin Keating at adkeating@noctrl.edu.