Anti-poverty law specialist Lucie E. White, the Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will deliver Cornell Law School's Robert S. Stevens Lecture, April 11.

White's lecture, titled "That's What I Growed Up Hearing: On Race, Memory and Emancipation," will be at 4 p.m. in the Stein Mancuso Amphitheater of Myron Taylor Hall. It is free and open to the public.

The topic of White's talk will be a meditation on an ethnographic project she began 10 years ago, looking into the lives and works of low-income African-American women in a Project Head Start pre-school, White said. As she has worked with women in the program, it has increasingly become a project on the ways that "our racial identities lock us into certain interactions and ways of viewing the world that are challenging to work out of," she said.

White's numerous publications on the relationships among race, gender and poverty include Hard Labor: Poor Women and Work in the Post-Welfare Era (1989), edited with Joel Handler, and Planning and Developing a Shared Living Project (1977). Her past work includes participating in the city of Cambridge Welfare Reform Task Force, serving as a consultant to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children, Youth and Families, and serving as an adviser to the Black Lawyers Association of South Africa. She recently was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in the Pew National Fellowship Program.

White received her B.A. degree from Radcliffe College in 1971 and her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1981.

The Stevens Lecture is supported by a gift in honor of Harriet Stein Mancuso '73.