ANN ARBOR—The Tamara Williams Memorial Lecture on Dating and Domestic Violence is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 16, from 7- 8:30 p.m. in East Hall Auditorium on the University of Michigan Central Campus. Oliver Williams, executive director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, will deliver the keynote address, "Ending Dating and Domestic Violence on Campus: Prevention, Intervention and Social Support." The lecture commemorates the life of a U-M student stabbed to death on the grounds of family housing in 1997. Tamara Sonya Williams was a Literature, Science, and the Arts senior living in family housing with her then 2 ½-year-old daughter. On the night of Sept. 23, Williams was repeatedly stabbed in her Northwoods townhouse by her boyfriend, Kevin Nelson. A Department of Public Safety police officer, dispatched in response to more than two dozen 911 calls, shot and killed Nelson when Nelson refused to stop attacking Williams. The University community marked Williams’ death with a series of memorials, vigils and renewed education about domestic violence and available campus and community resources directed at combating such violence. Williams was posthumously awarded her U-M degree in psychology in 1998. As a practitioner for more than 20 years, Oliver J. Williams has counseled individuals, couples and families, has worked in child welfare and delinquency, developed partner abuse treatment programs and worked in battered women’s shelters. As an academician, Williams has researched and written about effective service delivery strategies for reducing violent behavior among African Americans. He also writes about ethnically sensitive practice, as well as aging and elder maltreatment and has conducted training on several of these issues nationally. Williams serves on several national advisory boards focused on the issue of domestic violence. The Tamara Williams Memorial Lecture is sponsored by University Housing and supported by the School of Social Work, the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center, and the Interdisciplinary Research Program on Violence Across the Lifespan, a U-M effort to increase interest among faculty and students in research and training opportunities in the area of family violence.

The lecture is open to the public. To learn more about University Housing, see www.housing.umich.edu.