"Voices across the Atlantic: Revisiting Gullah's West African Roots" will be presented by Joko Sengova, retired research associate at the University of South Florida, on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 5 p.m. in the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts Recital Hall at Coastal Carolina University. The event is free and open to the public.

America's Gullah Geechee speech community of the Carolinas and Georgia still bears significant linguistic, cultural and historical links with peoples and voices in Africa. Sengova will re-examine voices on both sides of the Atlantic through cultural linguistic influences that pioneering African-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner found in his Sea Islands Gullah research.

The presentation will explore these two cognate Atlantic creole languages, reflecting on African voices that define their separate yet related backgrounds and identities across space and time.

This presentation is part of the Nancy Smith Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Series, established in 2004 to bring noted artists and scholars to support campus residencies for artists and intellectuals with distinguished careers in the arts, history, archaeology, international affairs or philosophy. Nancy Smith and her husband R. Cathcart Smith, an original founder of CCU, were committed to education. She was posthumously named an honorary founder of CCU in 2011.

The Recital Hall is in Room 152 of the Edwards Building, located at 133 Chanticleer Drive W. on the Conway campus.