The Department of Social Sciences and IIT College of Science and Letters Proudly Announce the:
Benjamin Franklin Project Inaugural Lecture featuring Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Gordon Wood
"What Made the Founders Different"
Please join us for this inaugural event of the new Benjamin Franklin Project with one of America's most distinguished historians.
Inaugural Benjamin Franklin Project Lecture What Made the Founders Different
Gordon S. Wood, Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University
Thursday, March 15, 2012, 4 p.m.
The McCormick Tribune Campus Center Auditorium IIT Main Campus, Chicago
Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University. Wood taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.
He is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal. Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Historian Gordon Wood Receives National Humanities Medal
As one of the United States' Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is known for his vision, his wit, his love of life, his expert knowledge in governance, science, engineering, business, education, music, and philosophy, and the treasure trove of writings, discoveries, inventions, and ideas that he left behind.
Through a series of events and special courses taught at the IIT campus, the Benjamin Franklin Project allows students and scholars to explore the full range of the Founders' work—from their most practical domestic devices to the extraordinary idea and architecture of the New Republic. The Project focuses especially on the Enlightenment and the Framers as scientists, inventors and designers in both the social and the natural realms, exploring how all these elements continue to spark imaginations and shape priorities in today's far more interconnected world.
The inaugural Benjamin Franklin Project Lecture will be delivered by renowned scholar Gordon Wood (Brown University) on March 15, 2012. This will be followed by a public symposium on April 26, 2012 featuring Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago), Stuart Warner (Roosevelt University), Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) and David Lieberman (University of California at Berkeley). The first Jack Miller Post-Doctoral Fellow will take up residency in the Department of Social Sciences and begin teaching in August of 2012.
Benjamin Franklin Image: Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, Benjamin West c. 1816 [src: http://www.philamuseum.org]