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Author and Educator Jill Ker Conway to Speak for Founder's Day

<<< Author, academic, and MHC trustee Jill Ker Conway will speak about "Nature and Human Nature" at Founder's Day ceremonies November 9.

Acclaimed author, MHC trustee, MIT professor, and former Smith College president Jill Ker Conway will be the featured speaker at November 9 Founder's Day ceremonies. Her talk, which is also part of the Mary Lyon Lecture Series, will address "Nature and Human Nature." The event starts at 8 pm in Abbey Memorial Chapel.

Conway gained wide recognition for her career as a professor and higher education administrator and for her 1989 book The Road from Coorain, a memoir of her early life, from growing up on an isolated sheep farm in New South Wales, Australia, to her departure for America. John Kenneth Galbraith called it "a small masterpiece of scene, memory, and very stylish English."

She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Sydney, received a doctorate in history from Harvard University, began a distinguished teaching career, and served as president of Smith from 1975 to 1985. Since then she has held a research position as visiting professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Conway's writing, which includes a second memoir (True North), often focuses on women's lives. She has written or edited books about the female experience in eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, the politics of women's education, the first generation of American women graduates, and women's autobiographies, among other topics.

Founder's Day ceremonies will also include recognition of Sarah Williston Prize winners and the newest Phi Beta Kappa inductees, and music by the MHC Concert Choir.