Coffee With The Profs
Every Wednesday, 12-1pm
Junior Common Room (JCR)
Join us this Wednesday, November 11th from 12-1pm in the JCR for the next installment of our “Coffee with the Profs” event series. Presented jointly by UC and the UAA Commission of the UC Lit, the events feature FREE coffee, FREE U of T reusable mugs for the first 10 people who show up, and, best of all, a chance to chill with UC faculty members over coffee!
This week’s featured faculty member is…
Prof. Michael Wayne
Reading from his recently released satirical novel, Lincoln’s Briefs, Professor Wayne will share his story of a Canadian university professor who tells his class on the American Civil War that Abraham Lincoln was not in fact assassinated but staged his own death so that he could take on a new identity, move to Canada, and fulfill his lifelong dream of living openly as a transvestite. This (seemingly) insane revelation soon finds its way into the press, producing panic on three fronts: at the university, where the new president and CEO has recently initiated a $3 billion fundraising campaign; in Washington, where the President is desperate to recover whatever evidence has been found so he can “protect the inalienable right of every American to believe in the innocence of his country”; and eventually, in England, where the professor’s aged mother, who long ago came to believe that she is Queen Elizabeth I, concludes that one of her loyal subjects-“he is like a son to me”-has been captured by American “Savages.”
Michael Wayne is a professor of American history, and author of two scholarly historical studies: Death of an Overseer, about a murder on a plantation in Mississippi in 1857, and The Reshaping of Plantation So- ciety, about how life in the American South was transformed by the Civil War and emancipation of the slaves. With regard to the satire of Lincoln’s Briefs, Professor Wayne comes by his passion for humour honestly (or perhaps genetically). He is the son of the late Johnny Wayne of the iconic comedy team Wayne and Shuster. His dad and Frank Shuster wrote, directed, and starred in the UC Follies.