The biennial De Graaf Lecture at Hope College will present the address "God-denying Fools: Imagining Atheism in Medieval Religious Art" by V.A. Kolve, professor emeritus of the University of California-Los Angeles, on Tuesday, April 2, at 4 p.m. in the Maas Center auditorium.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Sponsored by the college's department of English, the lecture will explore medieval religious thought in Western Europe by looking especially at illuminated manuscripts of the Old Testament book of Psalms.
Kolve is the author of "The Play Called Corpus Christi" and "Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales," which received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He also co- edited "Nine Canterbury Tales and the General Prologue," and has published many articles on medieval literature, art and culture.
After completing a B.A. degree at the University of Wisconsin, Kolve received B.A., M.A., and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and began his teaching career. He went on to teach at Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and UCLA, where he was the UCLA Foundation Professor.
Among other honors, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and teaching awards from the Danforth Foundation and UCLA. He is an elected fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The De Graaf endowed lectureship, which premiered in the fall of 1991, was established by the family of Dr. Clarence De Graaf in memory of his service on the faculty of Hope College. De Graaf taught in the department of English for 44 years, until his retirement in 1972, and served as department chairperson for 25 of those years. He died in 1986.