About the presenter:
John M. Lawlor, Jr. is professor of history at Reading Area Community, volunteer and consultant at the National Archives education center, and fellow/mentor at the joint Library of Congress/National Archives/Smithsonian Institution “On Native Grounds” institute sponsored by the Community College Humanities Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.  He will be in residency at the Library of Congress during the summers of 2015 and 2016. He is a graduate of Kutztown University with an MA in History.
John has made over 50 conference and workshop presentations, and in November he presented his World War II Folk Art project at the Community College Humanities Association conference in Baltimore. In 2008-09 he was named a “Commonwealth Speaker” by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council on the topic of the arts and temperance battle in Reading, PA. The topic was developed as a fellow at the American Cities/Public Spaces Institute. Serving as mentor at the next American Cities Institute, he researched and wrote about safety in public places during the Progressive Era with the Boyertown Opera House fire as a case-in-point. He has published numerous articles in a wide variety of scholarly journals.
Current projects include a Civil Rights oral history project with the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum, Professor Laurie Grobman at Pennsylvania State University (Berks), and her students. In addition, he is deeply engaged in Native American studies and a collaborative project with David Leight, Professor of English at Reading Area Community College, regarding Ernest Hemingway’s account of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane.
John is married to Michele Lawlor with two children, John and Alicia, and three grandchildren – Maverick, Mattias, and Josephine. He resides near Womelsdorf.