A&M-Commerce Sponsors Talk by Award-Winning Historian and Author at this Year’s Southern Historical Annual Meeting

George Mason University Professor of History, Cynthia Kierner, will deliver “Awful Calamity: Sentiment, Gender, and Nation in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811” at the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH), as part of the Southern Historical Annual Meeting. Kierner's talk will be at 4:45–6:30 PM, Saturday, November 11, 2017, at the Sheraton Dallas (400 N Olive St, Dallas, TX 75201) in the San Antonio B Room.

This year's SHA annual conference is scheduled for November 9th-12th and is expected to attract historians from across the nation to Texas. The SAWH Annual Address is an event held during the SHA's conference, and this year the speaker is sponsored by the Texas A&M University-Commerce's Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities and History in honor of the Handbook of Texas Women Project.

ABOUT CYNTHIA KIERNER

Dr. Cynthia Kierner is a professor of History at George Mason University and is a specialist in the fields of early America, women and gender, and early southern history. Most recently, she is the author of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times. Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello, was the winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Award from the Southern Association for Women Historians and the Richard Slatten Prize for Virginia Biography.

Her talk “Awful Calamity: Sentiment, Gender, and Nation in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811” will discuss the horrific fire in Richmond, Virginia, that killed at least 76 people, the vast majority of whom were women and children. This talk examines contemporary responses to the Richmond theater fire and how they related to gender, class, and race, and also to the ongoing construction of regional and national identities.