Beloved French Professor Lives on in Inaugural Lecture Series

ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA - The legacy of former Winthrop University languages professor Dorothy "Dot" Medlin ˜53 continues to live on with the memorial lecture series in her name.

Dr. Kathleen Doig, a colleague and friend of Medlin's, will give the inaugural lecture in the Dr. Dorothy Medlin Memorial Lecture Series on Thursday, Jan. 28, at 4 p.m. at the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections.

For her talk "Andre Morellet's World," Doig will trace the life of Morellet, a French economist and writer known for his biting wit. Morellet was acquainted with many noted scholars of the time, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It's an appropriate topic for the archives, which is home to a large collection of Medlin's professional research into Morellet's life.

Doig recently retired as a French professor from Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. from Fordham University and extensively published on topics such as 18th-century French literature and Enlightenment encyclopedism. She's also a member of the Atelier Panckoucke Encyclopedie Methodique, a research group in Paris, and is on the board of New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century.

She and Medlin co-edited the critical edition of Andre Morellet's "Memoires sur le XVIIIe siecle et sur la Revolution."

Medlin earned her B.A. in English at Winthrop and her Ph.D. at Tulane University in New Orleans. She taught in Concord and Charlotte, N.C., public schools before joining Winthrop's Department of Modern and Classical Language (now the Department of World Languages and Cultures) in 1967, where she was named Distinguished Professor in 1985. A renowned scholar of the history of French literature and philosophy, she published a book, "The Verbal Art of Jean-Franois Regnard" (1966); authored numerous articles about Morellet; and co-edited and revised a variety of anthologies and collections.

She passed away in 2011. She established the Dorothy M. Medlin Endowed Fund, which supports preservation of the works and writings of several prominent 17th- and 18th-century European philosophers, including Morellet, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, Baron d'Holbach, David Hume and Voltaire. The fund also supports ongoing research in French literary and philosophy history through seminars, addresses and lectures.

For more information, contact Gina Price White at 803/323-2210 or whitegp@winthrop.edu.