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Show Lecture planned "Humanities on the River Kwai," Southern Utah State College's Grace Adams Tanner Lecture for 1981, will be presented April 23 by Ian Watt, director of the Stanford University Humanities Center. Watt helped build the famous bridge while a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. His lecture will begin at 8 p.m. in the Thorley Recital Hall. The public is invited to attend the program free of charge. "We are very pleased i to have Professor Watt i with us as the speaker for . the Grace Adams Tanner t Lecture Series, and invite , the public to share his thoughts about . a very . remarkable experience," said Eugene T. Woolf, lecture series chairman. ! The lecture series, ! made possible through the generosity of Utah philanthropist Obert C. Tanner, began last spring 1 at SUSC with a lecture by ' social critic Vance Packard. A native of Westmorland, West-morland, England, Watt began military service in 1940 with the Fifth Battalion, Bat-talion, the Suffolk Regiment as a lieutenant. In January 1942 he was wounded and taken captive of the Japanese at the capitulation of Singapore. He was listed "missing, presumed killed ina action" in official of-ficial bulletins, but was moved by the Japanese to Siam to work on the railway from Bangkok to Moulmein. He won his release in August 1945. Following his release he resumed his studies at Cambridge University and won a fellowship to study in America at UCLA and later at Harvard University. His career as a teacher, primarily in English, took him back and forth between England and the U.S. where he has taught at East Anglia in Nor-wich, Nor-wich, Berkeley University, Cambridge, and Stanford where he served as chairman of the university's department of English before accepting responsibilities in his current position as director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Professor Watt is well-known well-known for his critical works "Rise of the Novel : Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding',' and the two-volume two-volume work "Conrad in the Nineteenth Century." Professor Watt's career as a teacher has included distinguished visiting professorships in Hawaii, Australia and Paris. |