(upbeat music) - The University of Utah College of Humanities is presenting a special lecture, "Imperial Ears: Robert Louis Stevenson in Oceania."

Professor of English Chris Jones is here with more details.

Hello, Professor Jones.

Welcome.

- Hi, Mary.

Thank you for having me here.

- Very, very nice to have you.

So this is part of a special lectureship program, and you're bringing in an international scholar?

- Correct, yeah, so it's an annual lecture in British studies in honor of President Gordon Hinkley, a prophet of the LDS church who was an Anglophile, he was an alumnus of the English department at the U.

Did his mission in London, he loved British literature and British culture, so we've got this lecture that's in his memory.

Every other year we bring an international scholar from overseas to talk about one of the topics he was interested and passionate about.

- All right, and so tell us about this year's.

- So this year, we've got Professor Emma Sutton, who's from the English department at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

So that's why I'm turned up in my Scottish regalia.

And it's about Robert Louis Stevenson, who was also a Scot.

So obviously, he's most famous for works like "Kidnapped" and "Treasure Island."

- Yeah.

- But what people perhaps don't know is he spent the last six years of his life in the Pacific Ocean, in Hawaii, in Samoa, in other island communities where he was an amateur musician and so he was learning indigenous music and composing in a kind of hybrid European-Indigenous form, and so Professor Sutton has found out, she's visited the communities that he stayed in, she's got lots of sort of oral testimony.

She's putting this together in a kind of history of his late years.

She's also a musician, so she's interested in his musical abilities as well as his literary abilities.

- All right.

- And yeah, so that's what the lecture is about this year.

- Okay, and it's free and open to the public, I see.

- It's free and open to the public, it's a public event.

We would be delighted to have as many interested people in as possible.

- [Mary] Wonderful, okay.

Thank you so much for being here and for the regalia.

- You're welcome.

- Thank you.

And if you'd like to know more about that lecture from the University of Utah College of Humanities, Imperial Ears: Robert Louis Stevenson in Oceania," it's January 16th from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House and the OC Tanner ballrooms A&B.

Go to british-studies.utah.edu.

I'm Mary Dickson.

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