- Bianca Premo, Florida International University, 2022
- Janaki Nair, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, 2019
- David Silverman, Georgetown University, 2018
- Kären Wigen, Stanford University, 2017
- Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2016- webcast
- Jacob Dlamini, Princeton University, 2015- webcast
- Laurent Dubois, Duke University, 2014- webcast
- Jeremy Suri, University of Texas at Austin, 2013- webcast
- Amanda Vickery, University of London, 2013
- Naomi Oreskes, University of California, San Diego, 2011
- Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University, 2010
- Lou Perez, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2009
- Peter Duus, Stanford, 2009 (lecture for 2008-2009 academic year)
- Adam Hochschild, 2007 (A webcast of the 2007 Alfred E. Golz Lecture is available on iTunes)
- Peter Hayes '68, Northwestern University, 2006 (A webcast of the 2006 Alfred E. Golz Lecture is available through Hawthorne-Longfellow Library's Special Collections Archive)
- Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University, 2005
- Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia, 2004
- Friedrich Katz, University of Chicago, 2003
- Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis 2002
- Weiming Tu , Harvard University, 2001
- Martin Schaffner, University of Basel, 2000
- Ira Berlin, University of Maryland, 1999
- Michael Blakey, Howard University, spring 1998
- Jonathan Spence, Yale University, fall 1998
- William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley, 1997
- David Keightley, University of California, Berkeley, 1996
- Hans Guggisberg, University of Basel, 1995
- Abiola Irele, Harvard University, 1994
- James McPherson, Princeton University 1993
- Nancy Farriss, University of Pennsylvania 1992
- Pierre Sauvage, Los Angeles, 1991
- Frederic Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley, fall 1990
- Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, spring 1990
- David Brion Davis, Yale University, 1989
2022: Odd Arne Westad
Alfred E. Golz Lecture Fund was established by Ronald A. Golz '56 in 1970 in memory of his father. This fund is used to support a lecture by an eminent historian or humanitarian to be scheduled close to the November 21 birthday of Alfred E. Golz.
The Golz Lecture for the 2022-2023 academic year will be delivered by Odd Arne Westad, Elihu Professor of History, Yale University.
The End of the Cold War and the Rise of China
Thursday, October 27, 2022
7:30 PM
Location: Kresge, VAC
The end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union happened during the 1980s, roughly at the same time that China’s rise to international power began. But how are these two seismic events of global history interlinked, and what do the linkages mean for international affairs today? In this talk, Professor Westad will explore the causes of the Soviet collapse and China’s ascent, and discuss the origins of the deterioration in US-China relations and Putin’s war in Ukraine.
About the Lecturer: Odd Arne Westad
Odd Arne Westad is a scholar of modern international and global history, with a specialization in the history of eastern Asia since the 18th century. He studied history, philosophy, and modern languages at the University of Oslo before doing a graduate degree in US/international history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he primarily worked with Michael H. Hunt. Westad has published sixteen books, most of which deal with twentieth century Asian and global history.
In the first part of his career, Westad was mainly preoccupied with the history of the Cold War, China-Russia relations, and the history of the Chinese civil war and the Chinese Communist Party. He published two monographs, Cold War and Revolution, which deals with US and Soviet intervention in the Chinese Civil War in 1944-1946, and Decisive Encounters, which is a general history of the Chinese civil war and the Communist victory in the period from 1946 to 1950. He also edited several books on Sino-Soviet and Cold War history topics.
Since the mid-2000s, Westad has been concerned with more general aspects of post-colonial and global history, as well as the modern history of China. The three key works from this period are The Global Cold War, which argues for ways of understanding the Soviet-American conflict in light of late- and post-colonial change in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean; Restless Empire, which discusses broad trends in China’s international history since 1750; and The Cold War: A World History, which summarizes the origins, conduct, and results of the conflict on a global scale.
Today Westad is mainly interested in researching histories of empire and imperialism, first and foremost in Asia, but also world-wide. He is also trying to figure out how China’s late twentieth century economic reforms came into being and how their results changed the global economy.
Westad joined the faculty at Yale after teaching at the London School of Economics, where he was School Professor of International History, and at Harvard University, where he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of several other national academies.