This free lecture series brings renowned biographers, a number of them Pulitzer Prize winners, to the Mary Washington campus to explore the diverse lives and achievements of remarkable people.
Lectures are always held at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, January through March, in George Washington Hall’s Dodd Auditorium. Typically, they include question-and-answer sessions and book-signings.
Video recordings of the lectures will be uploaded to the UMW Great Lives Lectures website and will be available in the weeks following the live lectures.
Interested in learning more? We're gathering lists of supplementary materials for each lecture, including books and movies you can check out from the library.
Lecture Schedule
Click subject names to jump to details on the lectures. All descriptions of lectures have been written by UMW.
January 21: Women of the CIA
January 23: Pete Rose
January 28: Rod Serling
January 30: Barbara Walters
February 4: John Glenn and Ted Williams
February 6: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull
February 13: John Lewis
February 18: Captain James Cook
February 20: James A. Garfield
February 25: Da Vinci to Einstein
February 27: Phillis Wheatley
January 21, 2025
The Chancellor's Village Lecture
Speaker: Liza Mundy
The Sisterhood: The Secret Story of Women at the CIA recounts the true story of the women espionage officers who helped build the world’s foremost spy agency. Propelled by the same meticulous reporting and vivid storytelling that infused Code Girls, The Sisterhood offers a riveting new perspective on history, revealing how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, and how their silencing made the world more dangerous.
Great Lives: Women of the CIA
January 23, 2025
The John and Linda Coker Lecture
Speaker: Keith O'Brien
Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago that still stands today. He was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn’t.
In the 1980s, Pete Rose came to be at the center of one of the biggest scandals in baseball history. He kept secrets, ran with bookies, took on massive gambling debts, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined him, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game.
Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies—the rise and fall of Pete Rose. Drawing on firsthand interviews with Rose himself and with his associates, as well as on investigators’ reports, FBI and court records, archives, and a mountain of press coverage, Keith O’Brien chronicles how Rose fell so far from being America’s “great white hope.” It is Pete Rose as we’ve never seen him before.
Great Lives: Pete Rose
January 28, 2025
The Russell Mait and Barbara Stone Mait ’79 Lecture
Speaker: Anne Serling
In this deeply intimate and soulful memoir about her father, Anne Serling reveals the fun-loving dad and family man behind the serious figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week.
In 1975, Rod Serling’s untimely death at 50 years old left 20-year-old Anne stunned and reeling. But through talking to his friends, poring over old letters, and recounting her childhood memories, Anne not only navigated her profound grief, but gained a deeper understanding of this remarkable man both as her father and as a dynamic writer.
Now she shares her journey, along with personal photos, letters, scenes of her dad’s youth, his service in World War II, and her family’s time together. As I Knew Him is at once a portrait of a father and daughter, and a tribute to Rod Serling’s legacy as a visionary, storyteller, and humanist.
Great Lives: Rod Serling
Help the Library Keep Printing Free!
January 30, 2025
The Gemini 3 Group Lecture
Speaker: Susan Page
Barbara Walters broke every rule – the belief that women couldn’t interview the most serious newsmakers, that women couldn’t anchor primetime newscasts, that women couldn’t demand higher pay than, well, anybody else. She did all that, and more. In a career of enormous consequence, she redefined the genre of the big TV interview, questioning presidents and prime ministers, despots and dictators, notorious murderers and more.
In The Rulebreaker, The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, Susan Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the “stunning” (Norah O’Donnell), “brilliantly written” (Andrea Mitchell) account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Great Lives: Rod Serling
February 4, 2025
The Davenport & Company Lecture
Speaker: Adam Lazarus
It was 1953, the Korean War in full throttle, when two men—already experts in their fields—crossed the fabled 38th Parallel into Communist airspace aboard matching Panther jets. John Glenn was an ambitious operations officer with fifty-nine World War II combat missions under his belt. His wingman was Ted Williams, the two-time American League Triple Crown winner who, at the pinnacle of his career, had been inexplicably recalled to active service in the United States Marine Corps. Together, the affable flier and the notoriously tempestuous left fielder soared into North Korea, creating a death-defying bond.
Although, over the next half century, their contrasting lives were challenged by exhilarating highs and devastating lows, that bond would endure. In his fifth book, The Wingmen, author Adam Lazarus sheds light on a largely forgotten chapter in these legends’ lives—as singular individuals, inspiring patriots, and eventually, however improbable, profoundly close friends.
Great Lives: John Glenn and Ted Williams
February 6, 2025
The Synergy Periodontics and Implants Lecture
Speaker: Mark Lee Gardner
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives.
Now, based on years of research and drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner’s The Earth Is All That Lasts delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders.
Great Lives: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull
February 13, 2025
The Irene and Curry Roberts Lecture
Speaker: Raymond Arsenault
For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a towering figure in the struggle for civil rights in the United States. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into “good trouble.”
John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is the first book-length biography of Lewis. Historian Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.” Arsenault recounts Lewis’s lifetime of work toward one overarching goal: realizing the “beloved community,” an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.
Great Lives: John Lewis
February 18, 2025
The Stephen Gaske and Patricia Powers Gaske ’75 Lecture
Speaker: Hampton Sides
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?
In The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, Hampton Sides both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s.
Great Lives: Captain James Cook
February 20, 2025
The Yuh Prosthodontics Lecture
Speaker: C.W. Goodyear
In President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixer and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more.
Great Lives: James A. Garfield
February 25, 2025
The Coldwell Banker Elite Lecture
Speaker: Bulent Atalay
Bulent’s new book, Beyond Genius, is more ambitious than his earlier books on Leonardo da Vinci. Positing that genius comes in degrees, from “ordinary” to “magician” to “transformative,” he examines the internal and external conditions that produced hundreds of extraordinarily brilliant men and women. Ultimately, he makes the main focus of the book a handful of transformative geniuses—Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein—two pure artists, two pure scientists, and one quintessential polymath who straddles the cultures of both the arts and the sciences.
Great Lives: Da Vinci to Einstein
February 27, 2025
The UMW Museums Lecture
Speaker: David Waldstreicher
Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives.
In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the Revolutionary era. He demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.”
Great Lives: Phillis Wheatley
March 11, 2025
The Walter Jervis Sheffield Lecture
Speaker: Elizabeth Varon
General James Longstreet is remembered by many as a prominent Confederate general during the American Civil War. He also was reviled by generations of white Southerners as an apostate—both for criticizing the generalship of Robert E. Lee and becoming a Republican and supporting Black voting and interracial governance during Reconstruction.
Centering Longstreet’s rejection of Lost Cause tropes, his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, and the theme of race relations in postwar Louisiana, Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South explores Longstreet’s influential political career and connects it to the perennial debates over his wartime record at Gettysburg and elsewhere. Longstreet’s life dramatizes, Varon shows, divisions within the South and the elusiveness of reconciliation over the meaning, legacies, and memory of the Civil War era.
Great Lives: James Longstreet
March 13, 2025
The Jubilation by Silver Companies Lecture
Speaker: Heath Hardage Lee
In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press.
In The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Hardage Lee presents readers with the essential nature of this First Lady, an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence, but who connected warmly with both ordinary Americans and people from different cultures she encountered world-wide.
Great Lives: Pat Nixon
March 18, 2025
The Roxanne M. Kaufman Lecture
Speaker: Stephen Michael Shearer
Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr, Stephen Michael Shearer’s in-depth and meticulously researched biography, written with the cooperation of Hedy Lamarr's children, intimate friends, and colleagues, separates the truths from the rumors, the facts from the fables, to reveal the life and character of one of classic Hollywood’s most beautiful and remarkable women.
Providing probing and detailed coverage of Hedy Lamarr's five marriages, children, various lawsuits, radio roles and shoplifting headlines, Shearer has combined extensive archival research with insightful interview quotes.
Great Lives: Hedy Lamarr
March 20, 2025
The UMW Dining Lecture
Speaker: Bob Batchelor
In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced his third novel, a slim work for which he had high expectations. Despite such hopes, the novel received mixed reviews and lackluster sales. Over the decades, however, the reputation of The Great Gatsby has grown, and millions of copies have been sold. One of the bestselling novels of all time, it is also considered one of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century fiction. But what makes Gatsby great? Why do we still care about this book a century after it was published? And how does Gatsby help us make sense of our own lives and times?
In Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, Bob Batchelor explores the birth, life, and enduring influence of The Great Gatsby—from the book’s publication in 1925 through today’s headlines filled with celebrity intrigue, corporate greed, and a roller-coaster economy. Batchelor explains why and how the novel has become part of the fiber of the American ethos and an important tool in helping readers to better comprehend their lives and the broader world around them.