Amity Shlaes is third Roe Howard lecturer

MOUNT VERNON – Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, will deliver Cornell College’s Roe Howard Freedom Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, in Hedges Conference Room, The Commons. Admission is free and open to the public.

Shlaes is a leading historian on 20th century finance, and is a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg. She has been featured in The New Yorker, Fortune, National Review, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs.

Shlaes has been awarded the Frederic Bastiat Prize for writing on political economy , served as the J.P. Morgan Fellow for economics and finance at the American Academy in Berlin, and has twice been a finalist for the Loeb, business journalism’s most prestigious prize.

Her book The Forgotten Man, which will serve as the topic for the lecture, traces the causes of the Great Depression to government intervention, rewriting the history of the period.

Shlaes will also meet with students and faculty over lunch and in an afternoon classroom session.

She appears frequently on Bloomberg radio, various talk radio stations, and television. She also contributes to Marketplace, the public radio show. She is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

To read a recent interview with Shlaes in Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, click here.

Shlaes is the third Roe Howard Freedom Lecture Series speaker, after Mark Steyn and Dinesh D’Souza. Howard was a Mount Vernon native, 1917 Cornell graduate and recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I. He was killed in action in France in 1918. The lecture series is funded through the generosity of the Riesen Foundation and Cornell trustee and alumnus Dean Riesen and alumna Barbara Hull Riesen.