11:40 a.m., Nov. 15, 2007--UD's third Black American Studies (BAMS) brown bag lecture for this semester will take place from 12:15-1:10, Monday, Nov. 19, in Room 206 of the Trabant University Center.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, an associate history professor at UD who specializes in 19th-century African-American women's history, will give a talk titled “A Mental and Moral Feast: Reading, Writing and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia.”

Her lecture will explore the lives of African-American women from the dawn of freedom in antebellum America, specifically the Northeast, to the turbulent years preceding the Civil War. It will focus on the ways in which African-American women constructed their freedom and their respectability through the maintenance of "friendship albums." Through poetry, sonnets and journal entries, friendship albums document the notions of womanhood, motherhood, freedom and equality written and read by African-American women in antebellum Philadelphia.

After Dunbar's talk, there will be an informal dialogue between the presenter and the audience.

For more information, call (302) 831-2897 or visit [www.udel.edu/bams].