Tuesday, October 21 2025, 12:45 - 1:45pm 101 LeConte Hall Join us as Professor Stephen Berry asks, Who killed Edgar Allan Poe? Stephen Berry feels compelled to study "old, unhappy, far-off things." A historian of mortality, his research explores the intersections of race, class, gender, family, violence, health and mortality outcomes in the nineteenth-century American South. He is the author or editor of seven books on America in the mid-19th century, including his most recent, Count the Dead: Quantification and the Birth of Death as We Know It (UNC press, 2022). Berry is Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association; co-director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History; and co-editor, with Amy Murrell Taylor, of the UnCivil Wars series at the University of Georgia Press. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Berry helps lead the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Georgia's Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Currently he is at work on The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg. Berry oversees two major web projects: 1) CSI Dixie, devoted to the coroner's office in the nineteenth century South; and 2) Private Voices, which collects the letters of Civil War soldiers, North and South, Black, white, and Native, who wrote 'by ear.' Students of all majors are welcome. Free pizza. This is an FYO event.
