INFORMATION FOR
Gautham Rao, professor of history and director of the law, technology and culture program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, will present the 27th Annual Abram Kartch/Thomas Jefferson Lecture at William Paterson University in Wayne on Wednesday, May 4, 2011.
More than 200 students from area high schools are expected to attend Rao’s address, titled “Regulating the Troublesome Market: Thomas Jefferson’s Surprising Expansion of Federal Power, 1801-1809.” The program will begin at 9:45 a.m. in the Cheng Library Auditorium on campus. A limited number of seats for the free program will be available to the public.
Rao received a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and is a scholar of politics and governance in revolutionary America. He has published several articles about U.S. political and legal history. One essay, The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” published in Law and History Review, was named best article of the year by the American Society for Legal History.
The Abram Kartch/Thomas Jefferson Lecture Series began in 1985 after Abram Kartch, a retired Paterson businessman and Jefferson scholar, provided William Paterson with an endowment to establish and continue the series. Designed to provoke discussion about the relationship of Jefferson’s words and thoughts to modern society, the series has presented lectures by many of the country’s leading Jefferson scholars, including Henry Steele Commager, James B. Shenton, Jan Lewis and Pauline Maier. Kartch, who in later years resided in Wayne, died in 1997 at age 93.
For additional information about the event, contact George Robb, William Paterson University associate professor of history, at 973-720-3058.
