2026 Speaker
Mr. Atkinson is the author of the Liberation Trilogy, a definitive narrative history of the liberation of Europe in World War II. Its third volume, The Guns at Last Light, became a #1 New York Times best-seller in 2013 and was hailed as “history written at the level of literature.”
He is also the author of the New York Times best-selling The British Are Coming, the first volume of his acclaimed Revolution Trilogy, which has earned numerous honors including the George Washington Prize and the New-York Historical Society’s Zalaznick Book Prize. The second volume in the trilogy, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777–1780, continues the sweeping narrative of the American Revolution, capturing the conflict’s critical middle years with vivid storytelling and deep historical insight. Atkinson also serves as a historical advisor for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series The American Revolution, which commemorates the Revolution’s 250th anniversary.
Among his many accolades are the Pulitzer Prizes for history, national reporting, and public service; the George Polk Award; the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement; and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize. He has served as the Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College and remains on its adjunct faculty.
A former assistant managing editor for investigations at The Washington Post, Atkinson reported from Berlin, Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq, earning a reputation as one of America’s most incisive chroniclers of war and leadership. Born in Munich and raised on military posts, Atkinson holds a Master’s in English literature from the University of Chicago and an honorary doctorate from Norwich University.
2025 Speaker
2021 Inaugural Speaker-Jon Meacham
Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian, contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, contributing editor at TIME, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. A former executive editor at Random House, he published the letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and books by, among others, Al Gore, John Danforth, Clara Bingham, Mary Soames, and Charles Peters. After serving as Managing Editor of Newsweek for eight years, Meacham was the Editor of the magazine from 2006 to 2010. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Society of American Historians, Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. Meacham’s book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White
House, a New York Times bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2009. His other New York Times bestsellers include Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, Franklin and Winston: An
Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, exploring the relationship between the two great leaders who piloted the free world to victory in World War II, and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. His latest book is The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. He is currently at work on a biography of James and Dolley Madison.
2022 Speaker-Ada Ferrer
Ada Ferrer is the Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. A specialist on Cuba and its place in the history of the hemisphere, she is the author of three award winning books: Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the 2020 Berkshire Book Prize; Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014), winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University and prizes from the American Historical Association; and Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), for which she was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. She will speak on this latest book for the lecture. Ferrer was born in Cuba just as the island was undergoing the upheaval and revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. Her father emigrated to New York in 1962, and her mother followed a year later, when Ferrer was 10 months old. She grew up in New Jersey, where her family maintained close ties with Cuban traditions and the local Cuban community, and where events in Cuba always had an impact on their lives. Ferrer received her BA from Vassar in 1984, her Masters in History at the University of Austin, Texas (1988) and her PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 1995. She immediately joined the history faculty at New York University, forging an outstanding academic
career there ever since. She is the recipient of more than a dozen major fellowships, honors, and awards, the latest being (in addition to the Pultizer), the 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the 2018-2019 Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, New York Public Library.
The Michael Gannon Lecture Fund was established in 2019 to honor Mike’s life and work through an annual lecture by a significant scholar or notable speaker.
The generosity of Lamar Matthews allowed us to bring Jon Meacham to campus this year for the Inaugural Michael Gannon Lecture. We want to continue bringing high caliber speakers to campus annually through this lecture series. Family, friends, and admirers of Mike are helping us prepare for future lectures through charitable gifts to the Libraries and we are grateful for their support. If you enjoyed this program, or if you remember Mike Gannon as an outstanding teacher, scholar, and community advocate, please consider making a gift to support the Gannon Lectures.
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