George Washington Forum News and Events

Wilfred McClay (University of Tennessee-Chattanooga)

Wilfred McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and, in addition, serves as a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and as a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A current member of the National Council on the Humanities, he also serves on the editorial boards of First Things, The Public Interest, National Affairs, and Wilson Quarterly. He has written or edited a number of books including The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994). He is currently completing an intellectual biography of the American sociologist David Riesman.

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1966. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Arkes has written or edited ten books, including The Philosopher in the City (1981), First Things ( 1986), Beyond the Constitution (1990), Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2002). A member of the advisory board for First Things, Arkes was the chief advocate and one of the primary architects of the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act of 2002.

This is a major international conference on the economic causes and consequences of the Great Depression. The conference opens on Thursday, 13 October, at 7:30 PM in the Baker Center Theater with the first plenary address by Amity Shlaes (Council on Foreign Relations) . Other plenary speakers include Anthony Badger (University of Cambridge), Brian Balogh (University of Virginia), David Beito (University of Alabama), Briam Domitrovic (Sam Houston State University), Gauti Eggertsson (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Alonzo Hamby (Ohio University), Lee Ohanian (UCLA) and Eric Rauchway (UC–Davis). Jack Epstein (Ohio University & Miller Center on Public Affairs), Andrew Morris (Union College), John Moser (Ashland University) and Kathy Olmsted (UC–Davis) will also deliver papers.

Michael Bentley (University of St. Andrews)

Michael Bentley is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrew’s, where he studies the philosophy and history of historiography. He was educated at Cambridge University (Ph.D.) and taught at the University of Sheffield for a number of years before coming to St. Andrews. He has written or edited ten books, including, most recently, Modernizing England’s Past (2005) and The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (2011). Bentley currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2009–2012) and is writing a comparative historiography of the modern West.

Tamar Herzog (Stanford University)

Tamar Herzog is Professor of Latin American and Spanish history at Stanford University, before which she taught at the University of Chicago and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has written or edited seven books, including Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (2003) and Upholding Justice: State, Law and the Penal System in Quito (2004). Her current work examines the relationship between Spain and Spanish America.