Oregon State University Professor Michael Oriard will give the Wenner-Wingate Memorial Lecture on the history of literature and sport, “Manly Heroes, Adoring Coeds, and Dumb Jocks: The Development of Football Stories in Fiction, Film, and Popular Art,” at 8 p.m. March 8 in McDaniel Lounge.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410-857-2294.

Oriard, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University, played professional football for the Kansas City Chiefs from 1970 to 1973. He has taught courses in American literature and culture and has written on the subject of taking sport seriously for more than 20 years. His recent work has been concerned not only with reading the literature of sport but also with some of the most highly charged issues in the representation of sport in the media and on college campuses. Those issues include race, masculinity, and athletics as a vehicle for social reform.

Oriard earned his bachelor’s degree in 1970 from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He began his teaching career in 1976 at Oregon State University and also has taught in Germany at the universities at Stuttgart and Tubingen.

He is the author of King Football: “Sport & Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies & Magazines, the Weekly & the Daily Press” (2001), “Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle” (1993), “Sporting With the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture” (1991), “Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868-1980” (1982), and “The End of Autumn: Reflections on My Life in Football” (1982).

The Wenner-Wingate Memorial Lecture was established through the bequest of Dr. Evelyn Wingate Wenner, a longtime professor of literature and a resident of Westminster.  Before her death in 1989 at the age of 88, Wenner planned the new lectureship in honor of her husband, C. Malcolm Wenner Jr., and her brother, W. Wilson Wingate.  Prior to his death in 1975, Wenner was a retired railroad official who was supportive of McDaniel students and his wife's research.  A distinguished Baltimore sportswriter in the 1920s and ’30s and a 1918 graduate of Western Maryland, Wingate is credited with coining the name of the WMC mascot¬¬ -- the Green Terror -- and with advancing the sport of lacrosse as a writer for the Baltimore Sun and later The Baltimore News and Post.
   
Wenner is best remembered as an astute scholar of Shakespeare and the literature of the British Enlightenment. While teaching at the College from 1931 to 1967, her main interest was George Steevens, an 18th-century Shakespearean scholar and editor.