Each February, the IACH invites a prominent scholar to deliver a lecture in commemoration of Presidents' Day. The purpose of the lecture is to reflect on such themes as the nature of civic leadership, the conditions for accountable government, and rhetoric and communication in modern politics. Recent Presidents' Day speakers have discussed the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
Location: Oklahoma Memorial Union
Featured Speaker: Professor Dame Linda Colley
Lecture Title: World History, War, and the Spread of Written Constitutions
Dame Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, is an expert on British, imperial and global history since 1700. Born in Britain, she graduated from Bristol University with First Class Honors in history, and completed her Ph.D. in history at Cambridge University. The first female Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, she moved to Yale University in 1982.
Her first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-1760 (1982), challenged the then-dominant view by arguing that the Tory party remained active and influential during its years out of power, exploring the consequences of this for ideas, popular politics and political action. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, and has passed through five editions, investigated how - and how far - inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
At Princeton, Colley regularly offers lecture courses on British and British imperial history from 1700 to 2000. She has also recently taught undergraduate seminars on the American Revolution in world history, and on the uses of ego-documents in history. She regularly heads a graduate seminar on Britain and global history from 1700 to 1950; and runs a senior seminar with Professors David Bell and Yair Mintzker on new research into the 18th century. Previous graduate students supervised by Colley have gone on to gain academic positions in the USA, Canada, the UK and Germany, and she continues to accept new graduate students.
