Dr. Elwood Watson, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at East Tennessee State University, will deliver his lecture, "O.J. Simpson- Black, Sexualized, Racialized and Still Largely Despised" at 5:00 pm, Wednesday, April 30, 2008, at 104 Gore Hall.  Refreshments will follow the lecture.

Dr. Watson's major areas of study are race, gender, masculinity, popular culture and ethnographic studies.  He was awarded the Russel B. Nye Award for Best Article of 2001 for his work, "The Miss America Pageant: Pluralism, Femininity and Cinderella All in One" and received the Paul T. Hiser Exemplary Publication Award for Best Article in 2005 for "A Historical Chronology of the Plight of African Americans: Gaining Recognition in Engineering and Technology".  He is also the author of There She Is, Miss America: The Politics of Sex, Beauty and Race in America's Most Famous Pageant and Searching the Soul of Ally McBeal: Critical Essays. 

Dr. Watson is a co-editor of the forthcoming Sexualized Mediated Masculinities: Media Images from O.J. Simpson to Neil La Bute and the sole editor of the forthcoming Contemporary Mediated Masculinities: Newmen? Gentlemen? Bastards?.  His monograph entitled Outsiders Within: Black Women in the Legal Academy after Brown v. Board is set to be published by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers in May of 2008