Pulitzer Prize-winning author and slavery expert David Brion Davis will speak at Cornell University Wednesday, April 8, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 165 McGraw Hall in a lecture titled "The Origins and Nature of New World Slavery: Seeing the Big Picture."

The lecture is free and open to the public and is made possible by the Walter LaFeber and Joel Silbey Fund in American History, which is sponsoring Davis' visit to Cornell.

Davis has been the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University since 1969 and taught at Cornell for 14 years before that. He won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the promotion of race relations for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, his first volume on the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the Atlantic world through the 19th century.

Davis also won the National Book Award for history in 1976 for his second volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. He also has been the recipient of the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. Davis has held a Guggenheim fellowship and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the leading professional association of American historians. He now is completing the final two volumes of his study of anti-slavery, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

"Professor Davis is one of America's most distinguished intellectual and cultural historians," said Joel Silbey, the President White Professor of History at Cornell. "His study of slavery and anti-slavery has become a landmark of distinguished scholarship for which he has deservedly won many honors. His return to the campus will be a singular event."

Davis will meet with faculty and students during his Cornell stay.

The sponsor of the Walter LaFeber and Joel Silbey Fund in American History is David F. Maisel '68, who studied under LaFeber at Cornell during the 1960s. Recognizing the impact that LaFeber and Silbey have had, and continue to have, on Cornell students, Maisel endowed a fund in their name to enhance the teaching of American history at Cornell, and to allow the history department to bring other outstanding historians to campus to interact with undergraduates.