George Washington Forum News and Events

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).

Brad Gregory (University of Notre Dame)

Brad Gregory is the Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Notre Dame. He holds advanced degrees in history and philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain and Princeton University. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999) won numerous awards. He has written more recently on secularism and the ‘new atheism’. His forthcoming book, The Unintended Reformation, shows how the problems of the early twenty-first century have their origins in the sixteenth-century religious reformations.

John Yoo (University of California Berkeley School of Law)

John Yoo is Professor of Law at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995-96. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers. His latest book is Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (2010).

Randolph Roth (The Ohio State University)

Randolph Roth is a professor of History and Sociology at Ohio State and a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. He specializes in the history of the United States from colonial times to the present, with an emphasis on social and cultural history, the history of crime and violence, environmental history, the history of religion, quantitative methods, and social theory. Professor Roth is the author of American Homicide (The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2009), which received the 2011 Michael J. Hindelang Award from American Society of Criminology for the outstanding contribution to criminology over the previous three years, and the 2010 Allan Sharlin Memorial Prize from the Social Science History Association for an outstanding book in social science history. American Homicide was also named one of the Outstanding Academic Books of 2010 by Choice.

Democratic nations have seldom been created in times of peace, and the United States was no exception. This conference examines the interplay between violence and the political, intellectual, social, and cultural histories of British North America and the United States during the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Plenary speakers include Andrew Cayton (Miami University), Patrick Griffin (University of Notre Dame), David Hendrickson (Colorado College) and Peter Onuf (University of Virginia).