Yale University Professor Dr. Kai Erikson will give a public lecture at the University of South Alabama Nov. 20 entitled “The Day the World Turned Red: Bikini, Nuclear Fallout and Other Reflections on Trauma and Disaster.”

His lecture will begin at 7 p.m. in the USA Humanities Building, Room 170. The event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Alpha Kappa Delta and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Admission is free and open to the public. No reservations are necessary.

Erikson joined the Yale faculty in 1966. His numerous books include A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community, and The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives.

His book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (1966) won the American Sociological Association’s MacIver Award and Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976) won the association’s Sorokin Award. From 1979-89, Erikson edited The Yale Review.

In May 1996, he was awarded the Harwood F. Byrnes, Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize at Yale College. Erikson was nominated for that honor by his students, who called him “a dynamic undergraduate teacher, a caring and gracious master, a wise personal mentor.” At that time, Erikson was recognized “for the concern and respect he has long shown to others, and for the shining example of his own character,” according to remarks made at the event.

Erikson is the son of noted psychologist Erik Erikson who received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1950 for this book, Childhood and Society.