Dr. Barbara Stafford, distinguished professor of art history at the University of Chicago, will present the first lecture in a series organized by UNLV's Women's Studies Program on Friday, Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m. in Beam Hall, room 241.

The series theme is "Women and Morality". Stafford is a a leading authority in the fields of eighteenth-century studies and computer imagery. Her books include "Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine" and "Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Culture."

In recent years Stafford has proposed a pragmatic understanding of visual knowledge that opposes the prevailing feminist position that patriarchal image making is one of the primary causes of the oppression of women. She will discuss her ideas in the lecture "Brain and Womb : The Technology of Transparency."