Award-Winning Historian Dr. Michael Neufeld to Speak on Wernher von Braun Feb. 26 and Feb. 28

Dr. Michael Neufeld, Chair of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Knopf, 2007), will give two public lectures the last week in February.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 26
"Wernher von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War"
7:30 p.m.
Roberts Recital Hall, UAH
Book signing following the talk

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 28
"Space Hero or Nazi Villain? Wernher von Braun as Cold War Icon"
11:10 a.m.
Frank Franz Hall, UAH
(as part of the UAH Honors Forum)

Dr. Neufeld's biography of von Braun was just chosen as the winner of the 2008 Richard W. Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians. The Leopold Prize is given by the Organization of American Historians every two years for the best book written by a historian connected with federal, state or municipal government.

Neufeld's book has been critically acclaimed by the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times of London. Neufeld also discussed his book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation in October and with the Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine.

Neufeld is visiting UAH as a Humanities Center Short-Term Eminent Scholar.

Public Lectures on the History of Ghana: Thursday February 21

The UAH Global Studies Program, in cooperation with the Honors Forum and the History Department, is pleased to announce two upcoming lectures by Dr. Jean Allman, an African history specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her main public lecture, on Thursday, February 21 at 7:30 in the Shelby Center, Room 109, is entitled ““Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959-1962.” The talk will explore Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, and movements for independence through a close focus on the relationship between struggles for the liberation of the continent from colonial rule and pacifist movements in opposition to nuclear armament. The movement against nuclear imperialism that took root in the Pan African freedom struggle not only showcases the “global” and the “transnational” in ways that need to be recovered, but stands as a counter-narrative, a corrective, to the afro-pessimism that has so dominated scholarship on Africa since the 1980s.

Dr. Allman will also give a lecture as part of the UAH Honors Forum. The lecture, at 11:10 a.m. on February 21 in Frank Franz Hall, is entitled "The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History."

Dr. Allman has written The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana, 1954-1957 (1993) and co-written TONGNAAB: The History of a West African God (2005) and "I Will Not Eat Stone": A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (2000). She has also edited several volumes and published over 25 articles. She has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and for the African Studies Association.