Mobile, Ala.,–The department of history at the University of South Alabama is sponsoring the second Howard Mahan Symposium and Multidisciplinary Conference “Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue,” in collaboration with the Journal of American History March 7-10.

This event will also feature the annual Howard Mahan Lecture with Guggenheim Fellow Dr. Lawrence N. Powell, professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans. He will speak on “An American Pompeii?” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 7 at the John W. Laidlaw Performing Arts Center Recital Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

His most recent book is “Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana,” published by the University of North Carolina Press, which won a Lillian Smith Book Prize from the Southern Regional Council and the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize from the Louisiana Historical Association.

He’s is currently working on completing a book about the history of New Orleans from colonial times to the present, which will be published by Harvard University Press.

Throughout Powell’s career, he has combined rigorous scholarship with civic and social activism. Since the 1990s he was vice-chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which he helped found, and a board member of the Amistad Research Center. Currently, Powell is the executive committee chair of the Southern Institute for Education and Research and serves on the executive committee and the advisory board of the Orleans Parish Workforce Investment Board. He is also a board member of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

Powell is a lifelong student of the American south. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University where studied with the late C. Vann Woodward. He has written and edited nine books and numerous articles.