He will give a talk on the humanities, which will introduce to the University community a new Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences.

More information All Assembly Series lectures are free and open to the public For more information call 935-5285 or visit the series Web site, http://wupa.wustl.edu/assembly Wills is a distinguished historian and cultural critic. He studied for six years in a Jesuit seminary in Florissant, Mo., intending to become a priest, but left the program and entered the graduate school at Xavier University, where he earned a master's degree in classics. He earned a doctorate in classics at Yale University in 1961.

As a journalist for Esquire magazine in the 1960s, Wills covered political campaigns. He has taught classics at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities and in the 1980s was the Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University, where he is now an adjunct professor of history.

Over the past three decades, Wills has written many books on a range of subjects that reflect his lifelong interests, including a biography of St. Augustine, reflections on Catholicism, analyses of political figures such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and a history of Renaissance Venice.

He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other distinctions include the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities in honor of his lifetime achievements in the humanities, the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award, and the Yale Graduate School's Wilber Cross Medal.