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Special to the Daily News

HARROGATE, Tenn. — Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) will welcome Corpus Christi College Oxford President Richard Carwardine to make the commencement address on Saturday at 11 a.m. at Tex Turner Arena. The British scholar is the author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power.

During the ceremony, LMU will confer approximately 445 total degrees including 163 associates, 178 bachelor’s, 102 master’s and two doctoral degrees. Approximately 420 students are expected to participate in the ceremony. The University will also award several special honors during the ceremony including the Lincoln Diploma of Honor, the University’s highest honor, to Carwardine.

Carwardine was elected President of Corpus, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford, in 2010. It marked his return to his undergraduate college, where he studied modern history from 1965 to 1968. As the Ochs-Oakes Senior Scholar in American History at Queens College, he worked on a doctoral study of American and British nineteenth-century religious revivalism. Carwardine spent a year of his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkley. He was appointed as a lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield in 1971. He served Sheffield until 2001, holding the rank of professor and dean of the faculty of arts during his tenure. Carwardine has been a visiting professor at Syracuse University and served as a Fulbright/American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2002 he was elected Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherin’s College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006.

Carwardine’s research focuses on American politics and religion in the nineteenth century. His publications include Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America 1790-1865 and Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Yale University Press, 1993). His analytical biography of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln: a Life of Purpose and Power, won the Lincoln Prize in 2004. Carwardine has given papers and lectured widely on both sides of the Atlantic to academic and general audiences. He served as an advisor to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and in 2009 convened an international conference in Oxford to examine Abraham Lincoln’s global legacy: the proceedings appeared as The Global Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2011). Carwardine is currently working on a study of religion in American national construction between the Revolution and Civil War.