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April 17, 2007
HISTORIAN TO GIVE ANNUAL JEFFERSON LECTURE AT WILLIAM PATERSON UNIVERSITY
Doron Ben-Atar, Ph.D., the chair of the history department at Fordham University and a member of Fordham’s Middle East studies and women’s studies programs, will present the 23nd Annual Abram Kartch/Thomas Jefferson Lecture at William Paterson University in Wayne on Wednesday, May 2, 2007.
More than 400 students from area high schools are expected to attend Ben-Atar’s address, titled “Thomas Jefferson and the American Fantasy of Power,” a lecture which will include a discussion of the President’s war-making powers. The program will begin at 10 a.m. in Shea Center on campus. A limited number of seats for the free program will be available to the public.
Ben-Atar is a specialist in Revolutionary and early national United States, American foreign policy, the modern Middle East and psychohistory. Among his books, papers and lectures about the crossroads of American history, he wrote The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy. Recently, Ben-Atar was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and he is a winner of the Morse Fellowship and the Fordham Faculty Research Grant. At Fordham University, he teaches the core survey course in American history, in addition to undergraduate courses on the history of the early American republic, the transformation of New England, history of sexuality in the United States, American legal history and American diplomatic history. Ben-Atar also teaches a seminar on the U.S. in the Middle East and the history of modern Israel.
The Abram Kartch/Thomas Jefferson Lecture Series began in 1985 after Abram Kartch, a retired Paterson businessman and Jefferson scholar, provided William Paterson with an endowment to establish and continue the series. Designed to provoke discussion about the relationship of Jefferson’s words and thoughts to modern society, the series has presented lectures by many of the country’s leading Jefferson scholars, including Henry Steele Commager, James B. Shenton, Jan Lewis and Pauline Maier. Kartch, who in later years resided in Wayne, died in 1997 at age 93.
An essay contest for high school and college students will be conducted by the University in connection with the lecture. Certificates and monetary prizes will be awarded to students who write the two best essays on the theme developed in Ben-Atar’s lecture.
The essays will be judged by Richard Kearney, William Paterson University Library, and George Robb and Lucia McMahon, William Paterson University department of history. Winners will be announced by June 5 and their winning papers will be placed on file in the University library. Their names will be engraved on twin plaques kept by their schools for the next year.
For additional information about the event, contact George Robb, William Paterson University associate professor of history, at 973-720-3058.
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www.wpunj.edu
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