Since 1999, the Edmund J. Fusco, Sr. Fund for Excellence in History has provided generous support to bring accomplished scholars to lecture at the University of Connecticut campus. The two-day visit includes a formal lecture, a morning seminar with a pre-circulated papers, and a series of formal and informal opportunities for the invited scholar to interact with students and faculty. After two decades, the Fusco Distinguished Lecture remains a focal point of the academic year for the department and the wider UConn community.
Previous Distinguished Lectures:
Bruce S. Hall
Associate Professor of History, University of California – Berkeley
“Timbuktu, the ‘End of the World’ and the Work of Commercial Capitalism in Nineteenth Century Africa”
Eric Tagliacozzo
John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University
“Ghosts in the Machine: Technologies of Imperialism in Maritime Southeast Asia”
Professor of History, University of Southern California
“Babylon and the Crusades: Where Did Western Civilization Begin?”
2018
Heather Ann Thompson
Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, The Residential College, and The Department of History, University of Michigan
“The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Why It Matters Today”
2017
Nile Green
Professor of History, UCLA
“The Muslim Discovery of Japan: Global History and the Inter-Asian Encounter”
2016
Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
“Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad”
2015
Kenneth Pomeranz
University Professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Chicago
“Late Imperial Legacies: Land, Water, and Chinese Development in Long-Run Perspective”
2014
Anthony Grafton
Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University
“Colonial American Readers and the Traditions of Latin Humanism”
2013
Stephanie McCurry
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
“Confederate Reckoning, Power and Politics in the Civil War South”
2012
Mai Ngai
Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University
“Chinese Gold Minders, the “Coolie” Question, and the Propaganda of History”
2011
Frederick Cooper
Professor of History, New York University
“Empire, Nation, and Citizenship: France and French Africa, 1945-1960”
2010
Barbara Weinstein
Professor of History, New York University
“From Enslaver of Indians to Symbol of Progress: The Colonial Pathfinder of São Paulo, Brazil”
2009
Jill Lepore
David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and chair of the History and Literature Program, Harvard University
“Poor Richard’s Poor Jane: Benjamin Franklin and His Ill-Starred Sister”
2008
Gabrielle Spiegel
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Johns Hopkins University
“The Task of the Historian”
2007
Caroline Elkins
Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
“The Most Expensive form of Illness:’ British Counter-Insurgency in Malaya”
2006
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
“Foreign Visitors to the USSR in the 1930s through Russian Eyes”
2005
Edward L. Ayers
Hugh P. Kelly Professor and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
“Eye-to-Eye with the American Civil War”
2004
Jonathan D. Spence
Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
“Living Through Trouble: A Chinese Family in the Seventeenth Century”
2003
Annette Gordon-Reed
Professor of Law, New York Law School
“Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: History, Race, and American Memory”
2002
Steve J. Stern
Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile: Politics, Culture, and Truth Since 1973”
2001
William Roger Louis Kerr
Chair in English History and Culture, University of Texas
“Writing the History of the British Empire”
2000
William Cronon
Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change”
1999
Paula Findlen
Professor of History, Stanford University
“Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Italy”