Senior Class President Ben Singer said Monday that the Dec. 20 Commencement will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the Smith Center, and the speaker will be English Professor Trudier Harris.
Officials from the Offices of the University Registrar are estimating that there will be about 1,330 degree-seeking graduates.
Harris has lectured widely on her specialty -- African-American literature and folklore -- and has spoken throughout the United States, Canada, Jamaica and Europe.
Harris also has published several nonfiction books on the same topic.
Among these are "Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals," "Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison" and "Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin," which won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award.
Harris grew up in rural Alabama with eight siblings, working in cotton fields with her family, according to an online biography on the UNC Web site.
She taught at The College of William and Mary for six years prior to her work at UNC.
Several awards, including the first annual Award of Distinction from Ohio State University in 1994, and, more recently, the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching, have been bestowed upon Harris.
Although Harris has not yet prepared her Commencement speech, she said she is excited to have the chance to speak.
