DURHAM -- Writer Paul Hendrickson, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, will serve as the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at both Duke and UNC Chapel Hill this fall.
The Lehman Brady Chair, a collaborative, cross-campus arrangement, brings distinguished writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other practitioners and scholars of the documentary arts to teach courses at both universities and engage in lectures, film screenings and other events for students and the general public.
The chair is supported by two endowment funds, one established at the Center for Documentary Studies by the Lyndhurst Foundation and the other established at Duke University by the bequest of Lehman Brady, an attorney from Durham who died in 1995.
Past chairs include Alice Gerrard, David S. Cecelski, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan and Bill C. Malone.
Hendrickson's most recent book, "Sons of Mississippi," a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune. In addition, it was named by many newspapers to their "Top 10" lists for books published in 2003. The research and writing, which took about five years, were supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducts writing workshops full time in advanced nonfiction and he received the Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Hendrickson worked for 30 years in daily journalism. He was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001.
Hendrickson was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: "Seminary: A Search." His other books are "Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott" (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); and "The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War" (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996).
Hendrickson has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State. He is currently working on his next nonfiction book, which has to do with Ernest Hemingway.
