Jefferson Scholar to Speak in Presidential Scholars Series
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March. 2, 2004
CONTACT: Kathleen McPartland
530-898-4264
Alan Gibson, Political Science
530-898-5737
Jefferson Scholar to Speak in Presidential Scholars Series
Peter S. Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, will give a public lecture at California State University, Chico on Tuesday, March 9.
Professor Onuf’s public presentation, part of the President’s Visiting Scholar series, is titled “Thomas Jefferson, the West, and American Nationhood.” It will take place at 7 p.m. in Harlen Adams Theatre (PAC 144). Attendees of the lecture are invited to a reception following the lecture.
One of the world’s leading Jeffersonian scholars, Professor Onuf is the author of numerous books and articles on Jefferson and the history of the early republic. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1973, Onuf taught at Columbia University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Southern Methodist University before coming to the University of Virginia in 1990.
Onuf’s book “Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood” (2000) grows out of his earlier studies on the history of American federalism, foreign policy and political economy. It traces Jefferson’s vision of the American future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.
A review of the book from the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs states: “Onuf’s unsettling recognition that Jefferson’s famed egalitarianism was elaborated in an imperialist context yields strikingly original interpretations of our national identity and our ideas of race, or westward expansion and the Civil War, and of American global dominance in the twentieth century.”
Onuf is now completing work on “One Nation or Two? Conjectural History, Commerce, and the Coming of the Civil War,” with his brother, political theorist Nicholas G. Onuf. It is the sequel to their collaboration, “Federal Union, Modern World,” a history of international law and order in the Atlantic states’ system during the Age of Revolutions and early nineteenth century.
Onuf is also one of the authors, with Edward L. Ayers, of “All Over the Map: Rethinking Region and Nation in the United States” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), the editor of “Jeffersonian Legacies” (1993), co-editor of “Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture” (1999) and “The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic” (2002), all published by University of Virginia Press. He is co-author with Leonard Sadosky of “Jeffersonian America” (Basil Blackwell’s, 2001).
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