Sunday, September 27, 2015

UNCW’s Department of History will host Christopher Dietrich on Thursday, Oct. 22 for the annual Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture Series. The lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Burney Center and is free and open to the public.

Dietrich’s lecture, "Energy Crisis: Oil and Decolonization in the 20th Century," tracks an alternative history that links processes of decolonization with the historical realities of the international oil industry. It revisits critical moments in that history and concludes with an analysis of the American attack on OPEC’s "authoritarian economics."

"The public lecture is not a one-off event. The program grows out of UNCW’s tradition of community connection,"said department chair Paul Townend. "So we really get to experience, as a university community, what it means to ‘do’ critical thinking, to ‘do’ engaged scholarship and to think together about important questions. Chris in particular is a scholar who is interested in discussing the connections between drone strikes and OPEC, between American policy goals and the aspirations and ambitions of people on the other side of the world.　The kinds of conversations he wants to encourage us to have are the ones we should be having at this university and in this community."

Dietrich is assistant professor of history at Fordham University, the editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the History of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1776 to Present (3 vols.) and has published articles in Diplomacy & Statecraft, the International History Review, Itinerario, Humaniy and Counterpunch. His first book manuscript, which is on the intellectual origins of the 1970s energy crisis, is under review at Cambridge University Press. He is a graduate of Grinnell College and the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sherman Series was established to honor two lifelong learners and friends of the Department of History, Virginia and Derrick Sherman. Each spring, the history department’s selection committee announces the topic of its upcoming lecture and conducts a national search to select the emerging scholar. The scholar visits classes, meets with faculty and students, and provides a public lecture. The following day, the speaker is joined by a panel of experts to further discuss the lecture topic.

- Kyle Brown

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