COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — Two prominent scholars on Abraham Lincoln are featured in a special Ursinus college lecture series commemorating Lincoln's 200th birthday in 2009.

Essayist and author Andrew Delbanco, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, will deliver a lecture at Ursinus College on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, as part of a special series, "Lincoln's Reflective Statesmanship." The lecture will be in The Kaleidoscope Lenfest Theater at 4:30 p.m.

Delbanco has written extensively on American history and culture, and in 2001, he was named "America's Best Social Critic" by Time magazine. He is the editor of The Portable Abraham Lincoln, a collection of Lincoln's writings. Winner of the 2006 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, Delbanco is the author of "Melville: His World and Work" (2005), which won the Lionel Trilling Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in biography. "The Death of Satan" (1995), "Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now" (1997), and "The Real American Dream" (1999) were named notable books by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. "The Puritan Ordeal" (1989) won the Lionel Trilling Award. Delbanco's essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Raritan, and other journals, on topics ranging from American literary and religious history to contemporary issues in higher education.

Completing the Lincoln series will be Allen C. Guelzo, Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, on March 2, at 7 p.m. in the Lenfest Theater in The Kaleidoscope Performing Arts Center.

Guelzo's principal specialty is American intellectual history, from 1750 to 1865. His doctoral dissertation, "The Unanswered Question: Jonathan Edwards' 'Freedom of the Will' in Early American Religious Philosophy," was published in 1989 as "Edwards On the Will: A Century of American Philosophical Debate," 1750-1850, by Wesleyan University Press, and won an American Library Association Choice Award. In 1995, he contributed a volume in the St. Martin's Press American History textbook series, "The Crisis of the American Republic: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction." His 1996 "intellectual biography" of Lincoln, "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President" (1999), won the Lincoln Prize for 2000 and the 2000 Book Prize of the Abraham Lincoln Institute. He followed this with "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America" (2004), which became the first two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize (for 2005) and the Book Prize of the Lincoln Institute. His latest book is "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America" (2008), which became the subject of an interview on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in February 2008.

Ursinus College is a highly selective, independent coeducational liberal arts college located on a scenic, wooded 170-acre campus, 28 miles from Center City Philadelphia. The college is one of only 8 percent of U.S. Colleges to possess a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.