Book launch: Revolutionary Elections in the Americas

Monday 18 May, 5:00pm
Rothermere American Institute, 1a South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UB

Chair: Adam Smith, Rothermere American Institute

Co-edited by Professor Eduardo Posada-Carbó and Professor Andrew W. Robertson

Commentators: Laurence Whitehead, Nuffield/LAC, and Richard Carwardine, Corpus Christi College and History Faculty

RevolutionaryElections

Richard Carwardine retired in 2016 as President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. From 2002 to 2009 he was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, and a Fellow of St Catherine's College. His analytical biography of Lincoln won the Lincoln Prize in 2004 and was subsequently published in the United States as Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. He is currently working on study of Lincoln and religious nationalism in the era of the American Civil War, a project supported by a Fellowship at the Huntington Library and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.

Laurence Whitehead is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and until 2015 was Senior Fellow of the College. During 2005/6 he served as Acting Warden there. In 2011/2 he served as Senior Proctor of the University. He has published extensively on Latin American politics and international relations, including Latin America: A New Interpretation, (2006) and Democratization: Theory and Experience (OUP, 2002). His edited publications include Let the People Rule? Direct Democracy in the 21st Century (2017) edited jointly with Saskia Ruth and Yanina Welp; Illiberal Practices:Territorial Variance with in Large Federal Democracies (2016); co-edited with Jacqueline Behrend; The Obama Administration and the Americas: Shifting the Balance (Brookings Press, 2010 ) which he produced jointly with Abraham F. Lowenthal and Theodore J. He is editor of an Oxford University Press series, ‘Studies in Democratization’ and President of the Conseil Scientifique of the Institut des Ameriques in Paris.

Adam Smith is the Edward Orsborn Professor of United States Politics & Political History, a Professorial Fellow at University College, and Director of the RAI. He regularly presents documentaries—mainly on BBC Radio 4—and writes for various magazines and websites. His latest book, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846-1865, won the Jefferson Davis Award and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.

Andrew W. Robertson teaches at the Graduate Center of Arts and Sciences of the City University of New York and at Lehman College, CUNY. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1989. He was recently Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy and was also the A. Lindsay O’Connor Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University. He has been a founding supporter of the digital election data collection A New Nation Votes, 1787–1825, which has assembled all extant voting data for the United States from the Constitutional era until the revolutionary election of 1824.

Eduardo Posada-Carbó is Professor of the History and Politics of Latin America at Oxford University, and William Golding Senior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. He has been Cogut Visiting Professor at the Watson Institute, Brown University; Tinker Professor at the University of Chicago; and Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame. He has published extensively on Latin American history, and much of his research has focused on the history of elections and democracy. His coedited book (with Joanna Innes and Mark Philp) Re-Imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1770–1870, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.