Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina are the subject of a public lecture by distinguished author and Southern historian Carol Bleser on Wednesday, April 3 at 4 p.m. in the Edwards Recital Hall on the Coastal Carolina University campus. The lecture, drawn from Bleser's latest book, Intimate Strategies: Civil War Commanders and Their Wives, is free and open to the public.

Bleser is Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Distinguished Professor of U.S. History Emeritus at Clemson University. She has also taught at Colgate University and served as Lewis Pinckney Jones Visiting Professor at Wofford College. She earned a bachelor's degree from Converse College and a master's degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She was also awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities by Converse College. She has held National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson, and William Gilmore Simms research fellowships. She has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and of the Southern Historical Association.

Bleser is the author of The Promised Land (University of South Carolina Press, 1969), The Hammonds of Redcliffe (Oxford University Press, 1981), Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, A Southern Slaveholder (Oxford University Press, 1988), and In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family and Marriage in the Victorian South (Oxford University Press, 1991). She also serves as General Series Editor for the Southern Women's Diaries and Letters series for University of South Carolina Press.

Bleser is teaching a class in Coastal's Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts during the 2002 spring semester.

For more information, call 349-2015.