WAU Honors Program Hosts Talk and Exhibition to Mark the New Authorized Biography of David Jones by Professor Thomas Dilworth
Takoma Park, Md. (April 10, 2017) On Thursday, April 13 the Washington Adventist University Honors Program will host Professor Thomas Dilworth for a talk about his new authorized biography, “David Jones – Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet.” The talk will start at 1 p.m. in the Richards Hall Chapel on campus (Bldg. 10 on the campus map), with a reception to follow at 2 p.m. at Weis Library.
This is another co-curricular opportunity hosted by the WAU Honors Program, which will expand this fall to an Honors College – the first in the Seventh-day Adventist system of higher education. The Honors College will further enhance the level of academic excellence at WAU, and will better serve high achieving students who want to be at a Christian school close to the nation’s capital.
David Jones (1895-1974) was a British artist and poet, considered to be among the most original of the modernist period. T.S. Eliot placed him in the same literary generation with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and himself, and W.H. Auden praised Jones’s 1952 work “The Anathemata” as perhaps the greatest long poem of the 20th century.
Recent events have brought the work of David Jones to wider critical attention, including a major retrospective exhibition of his art in 2015 with a large corresponding monograph, an academic conference at the University of York in the summer of 2016, and the premier of an operatic version of Jones’s World War I epic “In Parenthesis” that the Welsh National Opera commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of the battle of the Somme. It is a moment of reappraisal of Jones’s achievement that will be aided by the new authorized biography of David Jones by Thomas Dilworth, published on April 11, 2017. The book has already received wide critical recognition in the United Kingdom, and has been chosen for abridged reading on BBC radio during the month of April.
The WAU Honors Program has partnered with the University of Maryland Center for Literary and Cultural Studies to bring Professor Dilworth to the Washington, D.C. area to give talks on his biography, prior to a trip to London and the University of Aberystwyth in Wales as part of a larger promotional tour for the book.
To mark the achievement of Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones, and in concert with the talk that Professor Dilworth will be giving at Washington Adventist University on April 13, the WAU Honors Program is currently hosting an exhibition in the university’s Weis Library (Bldg. 2 on the campus map) featuring books by and about David Jones. The exhibition takes its organization from the title of Professor Dilworth’s biography, “David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet.” Each display case focuses on one of these facets of Jones’s life and career. Two additional cases feature books on David Jones by Professor Dilworth, and Jones-related books recently donated to the WAU Honors Program by Michael Allsopp, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at Mercy College of Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa.
The exhibition is open during regular library hours: Mondays-Thursdays, 8:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Fridays, 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Sundays, 1 p.m. to 11 p.m.; closed on Saturdays.
The exhibition and talk are free and open to the public. Washington Adventist University is located at 7600 Flower Avenue, Takoma Park, Maryland 20912.
# # #
Washington Adventist University is Montgomery County’s only four-year private college. Part of the Seventh-day Adventist system of higher education, Washington Adventist University has been educating college students since 1904 on a 19-acre campus in suburban Takoma Park, close to the nation’s capital. Approximately 1,100 students of all faiths participate in the university’s nine graduate and 42 undergraduate programs. The 2016 edition of U.S. News & World Report ranked Washington Adventist University among the best regional colleges in the north.
Media Contacts:
Angie Crews, 301-891-4134, acrews@wau.edu
Donna Bigler, 240-286-1169, dbigler@wau.edu