George Washington Forum News and Events

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.

Carlos Eire (Yale University)

Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He has written widely on late medieval and early modern Europe, including War against the Idols (1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (1995), and A Very Brief History of Eternity (2009). He won the 2003 National Book Award for his memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana. His latest book is Learning to Die in Miami (2010), an account of his early life once arriving in the United States as an exile from Castro’s Cuba.

Jane Landers (Vanderbilt University)

Jane Landers is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She has written or edited over half a dozen books, including The Atlantic World (2007) and Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999). A member of the Executive Committee of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University and past president of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, she also serves on the editorial boards of several historical journals. Her latest book is Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (2010).