Tuesday night (Oct. 8), one National Book Award nominee (UC Davis’ Alan Taylor) will introduce another (Harvard’s Jill Lepore) at the annual Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture in history.

The lecture is set for 7:30 p.m. in the AGR Room at the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center; admission is free and open to the public. The Department of History lecture series honors a 20-year faculty member who distinguished himself as a scholar in the field of modern European intellectual history.

Lepore, the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, will speak on the topic “Jane Franklin’s Spectacles: Or, the Education of Benjamin Franklin’s Sister,” based on her book, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.

In her illustrated lecture, Lepore meditates on what it means to write history not from what can be found (say, from Benjamin Franklin’s memoir, which excludes Jane Franklin), but from what has been lost.

Book of Ages is one of 10 volumes on the longlist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Lepore received a Bancroft Prize for The Name of War and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for New York Burning.

The nonfiction longlist, announced Sept. 18, also includes Professor Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.

In 1996, Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Award for William Cooper’s Town, one of his works about Colonial America, the American Revolution and the Early American Republic.

National Book Award finalists for 2013 are due to be announced on Oct. 16, and the winners on Nov. 20.

Taylor talk and book signing

Taylor will give a talk of his own, about The Internal Enemy, from noon to 1 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, in the bookstore lounge, Memorial Union.

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