Dr. Julia Bolton Holloway, medievalist and curator of the English Cemetery in Florence and author of many books, will present her lecture Iron Chain, Golden Ring: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence’s English Cemetery, and Freedom from Slavery at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 28 in Meeting Room B at the Donaghey Student Center.

The lecture opens UALR’s William G. Cooper, Jr., Honors Program in English Spring Lecture Series which is free and open to the public. For more information about the Cooper Program, contact Dr. Zabelle Stodola at (501) 569-3161 or e-mail at kzstodola@ualr.edu.

Holloway’s lecture discusses abolitionists buried in the English Cemetery in Florence, Italy. They include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wife of poet Robert Browning; Fanny Trollope, who wrote the first anti-slavery novel; Richard Hildreth, who wrote the second one; Theodore Parker; and a black Nubian slave who came to Florence at the age 14, baptized with the name Nadezda (meaning hope) by a Russian family, and whose story was told in Cyrillic.

The lecture recognizes the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire as well as the role of Little Rock within the U.S. civil rights movement. For more information about Holloway’s lecture, contact Dr. Michael Kleine at (501) 569-3160 or by e-mail at mwkleine@ualr.edu