Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, professor of English and Human Sciences at George Washington University, will be the keynote speaker at McDaniel College’s Holloway Lecture, “The Weight of the Past: Dreaming the Prehistoric in the Middle Ages,” at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13 in McDaniel Lounge.

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

Cohen will speak about how medieval people understood remnants of the ancient past such as fossils of prehistoric animals and structures like Stonehenge. It will explore the stories medieval people told to give meaning to the past.

“Can the past speak to us, like a living thing, or does it have to end like the wizard Merlin does: entombed forever in silent stone, the victim of his own inability to understand the world,” writes Cohen.

He is the author of six books, “Medieval Identity Machines,” “Thinking the Limits of the Body,” “The Postcolonial Middle Ages,” “Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages,” “Becoming Male in the Middle Ages” and “Monster Theory: Reading Culture.”

Cohen, who taught at George Washington University since 1994, has also lectured at Harvard and Tufts. He received his master’s and Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester.

The Holloway Lecture is named for Fred Garrigus Holloway, the fourth president of McDaniel College. A graduate of the class of 1919, Holloway went on to earn a divinity degree from Drew University and was ordained by the Methodist Protestant church in 1921. He served charges in Delaware, Virginia and Maryland before he was called to Westminster Theological Seminary in 1927 as Professor of Biblical Languages. There, his emergence as one of the church's most powerful preachers and as a promising young administrator led to the presidency of the Seminary, and, after a short time, to the presidency of the College itself.

In a critical period of growth and change, his insistence on academic excellence and collegiality made a deep and lasting impression on the institution, and his brilliant sermons and poetry readings enlivened a difficult decade. Because literature was an integral part of his intellectual curriculum, the College elected to present annual scholarly lectures as a lasting tribute to one of Fred Holloway's deepest commitments.