Medart Lecture To Focus On Sudan Crisis

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3/16/2007

The ongoing crisis in the African nation of the Sudan will be the topic of the next Maryville University Medart Lecture. Novelist, screenwriter and war correspondent Gabriel Meyer will share his experiences of his numerous visits to the Sudan in a talk at the University Auditorium on Thursday, March 22, at 7:15 p.m. Admission is free.

Meyer’s latest book, War and Faith in Sudan, focuses on his encounters with Sudan’s Nuba population. The book also was made into a feature-length documentary film, which Meyer narrated. Since 1997, Meyer has written extensively on the civil war in Sudan. He interviewed exiled Sudanese Roman Catholic Bishop Macram Max Gassis in 1997 and traveled with Gassis in 1998 to Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. Subsequent trips by Meyer to the Sudan in 1999, 2000 and 2001 provided the basis for War and Faith in Sudan.

Meyer’s work on the Sudan has appeared in several publications, including the National Catholic Register. Meyer covered the Balkan conflict for the Register in the early 1990s, living in Bosnia-Herzegovina while chronicling the region’s descent into civil war. He returned frequently to the Balkans during the Bosnian war, writing principally on the plight of war orphans and the politics of foreign aid. His dispatches from Sarajevo on the last day of the war in 1995 were nominated for several journalism awards.

Germaine Murray, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Maryville University and coordinator of the Medart Lecture Series (right), said the lectures provide a window to the world that is not always accessible in the classroom. “Part of my obligation is to help students, and people of all ages, hone and develop judgment, a sense of fairness toward those they disagree with, and an authentic openness to the past and the men and women who populate the pages and landscape of our cultural legacy and other cultural situations,” she said.