PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – On Thursday, December 1, Richard White will give a talk entitled “The Spatial Turn in History” at 5:30pm in the Lownes Room, John Hay Library, followed by a reception in the lobby. This will be the second talk of the Digital Arts & Humanities 2011-2012 Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and the Brown University Library.

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, and is a leading scholar in the history of the American West, Native American history, and environmental history. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his M.A. and PhD from the University of Washington. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Governor’s Award (1999), a MacArthur Fellowship (1997), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983-84); and has served on the board for several scholarly associations, acting as the President of both the Organization of American History and the Western Historical Association. He has written five books including Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America recently published by Norton, and is currently the principal investigator for the Shaping the West project, which explores the construction of space by transcontinental railroads in North America during the late nineteenth-century.

The Digital Arts & Humanities Lecture Series is free and open to the public. More information about the series is available here.