Humanists UK today announced that world-leading historian Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock would deliver the 2023 Voltaire Lecture, in a 14 November event chaired by its president, Dr Adam Rutherford.
The event will take place in at Conway Hall in London, and online. Tickets are available now.
Caroline Dodds Pennock is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield and the only British Aztec historian. She is author of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, published in January 2023 and featured as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Her first book, Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture, won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for 2008.
When Indigenous Americans arrived in Europe, they found a ‘savage shore’ – a land of riches and marvels, but with baffling beliefs and brutal inequalities. Upturning popular narratives of ‘discovery’ and challenging traditional ideas of ‘civility’ and ‘progress’, world-leading historian Caroline Dodds Pennock will look at the Age of Discovery through a new lens in Humanists UK’s Voltaire Lecture 2023.
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We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the ‘Old World’ encountered the ‘New’, when Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock will demonstrate in The Voltaire Lecture 2023, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others – enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders – the reverse was true: they discovered Europe.
Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield and the only British Aztec historian. Her first book, Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for 2008. On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe was published in 2023 and was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
She has appeared on TV programmes for broadcasters including the BBC, the Smithsonian Channel, and Netflix, and has acted as a named historical consultant for several TV projects, as well as writing for popular publications including Scientific American, BBC History, BBC World Histories, BBC Knowledge, and History Today.
Tickets, for both the livestream and the in-person event, are available to purchase at humanists.uk/voltaire2023. At time of writing, only a few Early Bird tickets remained.
Notes:
The Voltaire Lecture series has a long and distinguished history, stretching back through seven decades. In that time, it has been delivered by Professor Sir David King, Bettany Hughes, Professor Steven Pinker, Professor Brian Cox, Natalie Haynes, Michael Foot, Kenan Malik, Dr Henry Marsh, Bonya Ahmed, and Sir Ludovic Kennedy, and is always chaired by the president of Humanists UK.
For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 020 7324 3072 or 020 3675 0959.
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