Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar to Give Lecture at Gustavus

Dr. Philip J. Deloria, an author and professor at the University of Michigan, will visit Gustavus Adolphus College on April 23-24 as this year’s Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. As part of his two-day stay, Deloria will give a free public lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 23 in Wallenberg Auditorium titled, “American Indians in the American Popular Imagination.”

Deloria is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, with a joint appointment in the departments of History and American Culture. He is currently the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Deloria is also the author of two prize-winning books including Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places. He is also co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive.

Deloria holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Colorado, a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Colorado, and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. He has served as president of the American Studies Association, as a council member of the Organization of American Historians, and a Trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students. Now entering its 58^th year, the Visiting Scholar Program has sent 611 Scholars nationwide on more than 5,000 two-day visits.

The Gustavus chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the Eta chapter of Minnesota, was approved in 1982 and formally chartered in April 1983. Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society. It has chapters at 280 institutions and more than half a million members throughout the country.