Events & Calendars Hugh Hawkins Lecture 2017: "The Approaching Past: Legacies of Slavery and Conquest on Campus"

The Department of History is delighted to welcome Craig Steven Wilder to campus to deliver the 15th annual Hugh Hawkins lecture. Dr. Wilder, the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be speaking on contemporary efforts of colleges and universities to confront historical relationships to slavery and colonialism. His most recent book is the award-winning Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. He is also the author of A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn and In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. His talk will examine how we arrived at this moment and how to address the challenges that remain.

The annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture honors Hugh D. Hawkins, who was the Anson D. Moore Professor of History and American Studies upon his retirement from the faculty in 2000 after 43 years of teaching at Amherst. He was a distinguished scholar of American higher education, of the American South and of cultural and intellectual history. In 1976 he was the principal architect of the first-year Introduction to Liberal Studies curriculum, and he helped build both the history and American studies departments.