Turning Points in History Lecture Series

Department of History & Political Science

Readings & Resources

Description

The History Department created the TPH Lecture series in 2003 for the purpose of bringing to campus scholars in many different historical fields to share in public lectures and through student seminars their research on important moments in the human narrative that had profound influence on the future course of events. Although there are dozens of lectureship programs at universities across the country, the UVU program is unique because it first seeks to bring the campus and community together in the spirit of engagement by offering an open lecture, and second because the scholar leads a separate seminar with history majors that provides them the opportunity in a more intimate and informal setting to evaluate primary documents and crucial moments in history. The Department has hosted 40 scholars to date.

2014 Upcoming Dates & Agendas

For more information and to join the seminar list please contact Dr. William W. Cobb, Jr. at 801.863.8846, or Dr. Lyn Bennett at 801.863.8136

Participants

Dr. Jay Buckley

Jay Buckley, an Associate Professor of History, is the author of William Clark: Indian Diplomat (2008) and co-author of By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis (2006), Orem [Utah] (2010); and Zebulon Pike, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (2012).

Recipient of the Charles Redd Center's Mollie and Karl G. Butler Young Scholar Award in Western Studies, Buckley currently serves on the national Board of Directors of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, which provides national leadership on scholarship, education, and conservation pertaining to the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. In 2010 the LCTHF awarded Buckley a Meritorious Achievement Award for his Lewis and Clark scholarship. Jay and his wife, Becky, are the parents of three children.

Dr. Matthew Basso,

Assistant Professor, History
Director, American West Center
Assistant Professor, Comparative Gender and Sexuality

Matt Basso, jointly appointed in History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota’s Program in American Studies in 2001, his MA in history from the University of Montana in 1996, and taught in various roles at both those universities as well as in the U.S. Army while serving in Germany during the Gulf War. He retired as a Captain in 1994. He is the Director of the American West Center at the University of Utah where he has spearheaded several digital history initiatives, including the Utah American Indian Digital Archive and the Utah Indian Curriculum Project. His current book project focuses on World War II home-front masculinity and will be published by the University of Chicago Press. The relationship between place and the instrumental wartime role of masculinity, whiteness, religion, and working-class subjectivity, and the part played by cultural artifacts in the process of defining exclusionary (and inclusionary) social and political practices, form the core of the study. He is also the co-editor of Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the U.S. West (New York: Routledge, 2001) and is editing a lost Federal Writers’ Project Manuscript from the 1930s. He spent the 2003-2004 academic year in New Zealand as a Senior Fulbright Scholar beginning work on his next project: a comparative transnational exploration of racial and gender formations among Pacific settler societies (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.).

Dr. William Chafe

Dr. William Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University. Dr. Chafe is the author of numerous notable historical texts on United States history. Much of his professional scholarship reflects his long term interest in issues of race and gender equality. Dr. Chafe has been a leader in the effort to bring interdisciplinary studies to higher education. He is former president of the Organization of American Historians, and served for nine years as Dean of the Faculty and Vice-Provost at Duke University. Professor Chafe has been co-director of the Duke Oral History Program, and the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations. He is a founder and the former academic director of the Duke-UNC Center for Research on Women. He is also a founder and senior research associate of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890-2008 (2008), The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (2006), The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (1991), Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1981), and Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America (2005).

Dr. Mia Bay

Dr. Mia Bay is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, and the associate director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. An intellectual historian who focuses on African American history, she is author of The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925 (2000), as well as the recent biography To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009). She is currently writing a book on African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson and has also begun to research a new project on the social history of segregated transportation.