Trouble viewing? Open in web browser.

Journalist Resources Stanford News Stanford Experts Contact Us
Stanford University homepage

News Service

February 17, 2006

Leading authority on the history of slavery to deliver Tanner Lectures

David Brion Davis, the Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University and a preeminent scholar of the history of slavery, will deliver the 2006 Tanner Lectures on Human Values Feb. 22-24. The President's Office and the Barbara and Bowen McCoy Program in Ethics in Society jointly sponsor the Tanner Lectures and seminars, which are free and open to the public.

Davis will present two lectures on the topic "Exiles, Exodus and Promised Lands." The first lecture will be presented from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, in Room 2, Building 200 (History Corner). A discussion seminar with Stanford sociology Professor Lawrence Bobo, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Program in African and African American Studies, and Walter Johnson, associate professor of history at New York University, will follow on Feb. 23 from 9 to 11 a.m. in SIEPR A in the Landau Economics Building.

The second lecture will be presented from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, in History Corner, Room 2. A discussion seminar following that lecture will be held on Feb. 24, from 10 a.m. to noon in SIEPR A. Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, and Paul Lovejoy, the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History at York University, will participate.

Davis is the emeritus director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and the author of many award-winning books, including The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823 (1975), which won the National Book Award. His latest book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, will be published next month.

Davis received his doctorate from Harvard in 1956. He taught at Cornell University and was the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University before joining the Yale faculty, where he taught from 1970 to 2001.

The Tanner Lectures are held annually at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the universities of California, Michigan and Utah, and in England at Cambridge and Oxford universities. Established in 1978 by Obert Clark Tanner, an industrialist, legal scholar and philosopher, the lectures are meant to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values.

-30-

Contact

Barbara Palmer, News Service: (650) 724-6184, barbara.palmer@stanford.edu

 

Update your subscription

  • Email: news-service@stanford.edu
  • Phone: (650) 723-2558

More Stanford coverage

Facebook Twitter iTunes YouTube Futurity RSS

Journalist Resources Stanford News Stanford Experts Contact Us

© Stanford University. Stanford, California 94305. (650) 723-2300.