February 28, 2012 — Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Louis Menand will lecture on "The Education of Andy Warhol" on March 22 at the University of Virginia. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Menand's talk, the U.Va. Art Museum's annual Gladys S. Blizzard Lecture, will be the inaugural lecture for the new Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Menand's lecture, "The Education of Andy Warhol," will be held at 6 p.m. in the auditorium of the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture and Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, and seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis. A reception will be held afterward at the museum.

Warhol didn't invent Pop art; it had already happened by the time Warhol appeared on the art scene. Menand will discuss why Warhol took so long to emerge as an important artist, and what made his work distinctive and historically important.

"The U.Va. Art Museum is proud to team with the new Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures to invite the distinguished scholar and writer, Louis Menand, to Grounds as the first of many continuing joint projects between the museum and the center," said museum director Bruce Boucher.

The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures seeks to build an active community of intellectual engagement at the University and to extend the cause of the humanities around the world," institute director Michael Levenson said. "The Global Humanities Initiative will bring international faculty and students into sustained partnership in order to promote humanistic values at a time when they are so urgently needed."

Menand also will participate on a panel discussion about the humanities on March 21 at 6 p.m. in Nau Hall, room 101, sponsored by the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.

Menand is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has also taught at Princeton University, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including "The Metaphysical Club," which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2002. He has been associate editor at The New Republic (1986-1987), literary editor of The New Yorker (1993-1994) and contributing editor of The New York Review of Books (1994-2001). Since 2001 he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is "The Marketplace of Ideas," on American higher education.

The event is co-sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and is a headline program for the Virginia Festival of the Book.

The Gladys S. Blizzard Lecture, named in honor of a beloved museum educator and author of the "Come Look With Me" series of children's books about art, annually brings a prominent member of the art world to the University.

For information, call 434-243-2050 or e-mail museumoutreach@virginia.edu.