Lecture by Harvard women and gender expert Dr. Caroline Light to be held March 16

The Marshall University Department of History will present the 2020 Charles Hill Moffat Lecture, featuring Dr. Caroline Light, director of undergraduate studies and senior lecturer at the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.  The talk, “Whose Castle?: The Weaponization of Self-Defense,” will draw on Light’s important 2018 book, Stand Your Ground. 

The lecture will be at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, in the Memorial Student Center’s Shawkey Dining Room on Marshall’s Huntington campus.  The event is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.

Light’s insights “help us to place the difficult issue of gun violence into historical context,” said Dr. Greta Rensenbrink, chair of the Department of History at Marshall.

According to Marshall Professor of History Dr. Kat Williams, Light’s book “explores the development of the American right to ‘self-defense,’ and reveals how the ‘duty to retreat’ from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense, from the original ‘castle laws’ to the radicalization of the NRA.”

The lecture is sponsored by the Charles Hill Moffat Fund, the Marshall University Department of History and the College of Liberal Arts.