Cherry Award Winner to Speak on Cold Mountain Jan. 26

Dr. Paul Ashdown, the 1998 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers recipient, will give a lecture on the best-selling novel Cold Mountain at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 26, in room 101 of the Castellaw Communications Building on the Baylor University campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
"Cold Mountain is projected to be the most successful Civil War novel since Gone With The Wind," said Ashdown. "As a journalist, I find the novel especially interesting because it is about how news, myth, history, personal experience, memory and rumor tend to get all mixed up. In the lecture, I will try to untangle the fact and fiction in the story a little bit. I also will discuss Civil War journalism as it applies to the novel."
Ashdown, who is professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, also will teach two journalism classes while on campus.
Earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Florida and his doctorate from Bowling Green State University, Ashdown joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 1977. He has served as assistant and acting associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of Communications and as acting director of the school of journalism.
The winner of numerous awards and honors, he was selected in 1997 for Who's Who in the Media and Communications and Who's Who in the South and Southwest. Additionally, he received the UT National Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award in 1991 and was named the Chancellor's Teacher-Scholar from 1995-1997.
Robert Foster Cherry, a 1929 Baylor graduate, established the Cherry Awards to honor great teachers and to expose Baylor students to the world's greatest teachers. Ashdown and Robert H. Bell, an English professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, were the recipients of the 1998 award. Each received $12,500 and agreed to give a week-long series of lectures at Baylor. Bell conducted his lecture series during the 1998 fall semester.