Since 2002, the UNCW History Department has hosted an annual lecture series established to honor two lifelong learners and friends of the department, Virginia and Derrick Sherman.
The Competition
Each year, a selection committee conducts a national competition to select the Sherman Emerging Scholar.
The History Department hosts the Sherman Scholar on campus, during which time they visit UNCW classes, provide interviews to the local press, meet with faculty members and present a public lecture for the Wilmington community. The lecture is followed by a roundtable discussion of its themes featuring eminent researchers. All lectures are published by the UNCW Publication Laboratory and distributed to UN Repository Libraries.
Twentieth Annual Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture
Dr. Anne Kerth: The Afterlife of Secrets: A Slave Conspiracy in Antebellum Charleston, October 27, 2021.
The endowed lecture series provides a platform for young thinkers with compelling insights into the connections between the past and the present. There are few academic venues where a promising early scholar is given the opportunity to be center stage to share their intriguing ideas with a university audience and the wider community, including concerned citizens and fellow lifelong learners.
Scholar Roundtable
A roundtable discussion of the Emerging Scholar lecture's themes featuring several eminent researchers, October 28, 2021.
How such an original lecture series came to be is a story not only of the generosity but also of the curiosity and the creative thinking of the Sherman family.
Most of us in the History Department at UNCW fondly remember Virginia and Derrick Sherman, a pair of intellectually vibrant retirees who moved to Wilmington and came to value our department's public programs and academic work. Virginia devoted herself to the UN Association while Derrick enrolled in our history classes well into his 90s.
Such interesting people turned out to have a pair of equally interesting children, and it is Philip Sherman and Ann Sherman-Skiba, and their spouses, who founded the Sherman Lecture endowment to honor their parents. Philip and his wife Birgitta continue to contribute to the success of this lectureship and to the Sherman program through their continued interest in the series and ongoing friendship with UNCW's History Department.
