The Dan and Carole Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Series brings renowned historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto to Billings, North lounge on Thursday, Oct. 24 at 4 p.m. for a talk titled “A Typical Latin American Country – the United States: The Connected Histories of the Americas in Global Perspective.”

By looking at the U.S. from a Hispanic perspective and in a global context, Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, will challenge cherished assumptions about where and how the history of the country began; what, if anything, is exceptional in the story; what part immigrants have played in it; and how and why it has diverged from the histories of other parts of the Americas. Drawn from his forthcoming book All Right in America, his talk will illustrate how this view allows one to see U.S. history in a light that has been neglected in schools.

Fernández-Armesto is the author or editor of 34 books on a wide variety of topics relating to world history, focusing in the areas of exploration and colonization, environmentalism, and the transmission across vast spaces of peoples, commodities, and ideas. He spent most of his career at University of Oxford before becoming chair of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 2000, and the Prince of Asturias Chair at Tufts University in 2005. He’s won multiple book awards, including the World History Association Book Prize in 2007, and has had many distinguished visiting appointments including a Fellowship oft the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He also writes regular columns in the British and Spanish press and is the longest-serving presenter of BBC radio’s flagship current affairs program, "Analysis."

The lecture is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by College of Arts and Sciences; College of Education and Social Services; College of Nursing and Health Sciences; Honors College; Center for Cultural Pluralism; Department of History; UVM’s Chief Diversity Officer; Kappa Delta Pi; Phi Alpha Theta; and Pi Gamma Mu.

PUBLISHED

10-23-2013
University Communications