October 2002 Public Lecture on Atlantic History at NUI Galway

The new Centre for the Study for Human Settlement and Historical Change at NUI, Galway will host its inaugural public lecture entitled On the Contours of Atlantic History on Thursday, 17 October, 2002. The lecture will take place at 8.00 p.m., in the Ó Eocha Theatre, Arts Millennium Building. Professor Bernard Bailyn, Director of the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University will deliver the lecture. All are welcome.

Bernard Bailyn has been the most distinguished of the senior historians at Harvard University over the past half century; a fact acknowledged by his appointment in 1981 as the Adams University Professor at Harvard. More recently, he has established and directed the highly successful Harvard International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World.

Professor Bailyn s many books have had an Atlantic dimension starting with his influential study of "New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century". After this he immersed himself in the study of the pamphlets which were published to justify the challenge to British authority that culminated in the American Revolution of 1776. The pinnacle of Bailyn s endeavours on this subject was his book "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution", which was awarded both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1968. More recently, he has been engaged in a massive study on emigration described in his book "The Peopling of British North America". The first instalment of this undertaking has appeared under the title "Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution". Besides these and many other books, Bernard Bailyn has been an influential and successful teacher, and has lectured extensively throughout the world.

NUI, Galway was awarded €2.5 million by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) to establish the Centre for Human Settlement and Historical Change. The award in 2000 under the HEA Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions was the largest amount ever given to a university for humanities research. A new purpose-built research centre, which will be officially opened early in 2003, has been built. The Centre will contribute significantly to the understanding of the economic, social, cultural and political factors at work in Ireland, Europe and throughout the world in earlier centuries as well as in the recent past.

The Centre will build on existing expertise in NUI, Galway in different areas, including History, Archaeology, Irish Studies and a range of literatures and languages. It will focus the work of some two-dozen established academics and bring within its new dedicated building some thirty young doctoral and post-doctoral researchers.

A programme of research into the historical creation of colonies, cultural landscapes and planter societies around the world and in Ireland itself will be carried out at the Centre. It will also research the new worlds in the Atlantic and Pacific produced by Europeans on the move - new worlds that profoundly changed the old world of Europe.

Information from: Máire Mhic Uidhir, Press Officer, NUI, Galway. Tel. 091-750418