WHAT: The University of Illinois Springfield will host the 21st annual Beaumont Endowed Lincoln Legacy Lecture on “Abraham Lincoln and Digital Humanities” featuring Professor Christopher Oakley, leader of “The Virtual Lincoln Project” at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Asheville, and Michelle A. Krowl, the curator of the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. The lecture is free and open to the public.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6 (refreshments and hors d’oeuvres start at 6 p.m.)
WHERE: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum, 212 N. Sixth St., Springfield
DETAILS: Oakley is a former Disney and DreamWorks animator who teaches animation in the New Media Department at UNC Asheville. Since the age of five, he has been fascinated by Abraham Lincoln and has spent much of his life researching the 16th president. In 2013, his discovery of a previously unknown image of Abraham Lincoln in a crowd photograph at the ceremony where Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address went viral, making headlines around the world. Lightning struck again in 2022 when Oakley’s presentation on where Lincoln was standing when he delivered the Gettysburg Address made the front page of the New York Times.
Krowl is the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the manuscript division at the Library of Congress. She received a bachelor’s in history from the University of California, Riverside, and a master’s and doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several articles and books on topics relating to the Civil War, as well as Quantico, Virginia and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a library assistant at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College and as a research assistant for historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.