Delton selected as Moseley Faculty Research Lecturer

Skidmore history Professor Jennifer Delton will present the College’s annual Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 17, at Skidmore’s Gannett Auditorium. The title of the lecture is “When We Were Liberal: Explaining the Twentieth Century.”

The lecture is free and open to the public. A dessert reception will follow in the Class of 1967 Lobby of Palamountain Hall.

Delton is the Douglas Family Chair in American Culture, History, and Literary and Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore. She holds a B.A. in American studies from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. She has been teaching at Skidmore since 1997, offering classes on U.S. foreign policy, race and ethnicity, the Progressive era, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, American communism and anticommunism, U.S. politics, business history and African American history.

Delton is the author of Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, Racial Integration and Corporate America, 1940–1990 and Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal as well as numerous articles about race, politics, and business. She is also a regular contributor to Salmagundi Magazine and a sometimes blogger on Huffington Post.

The annual Moseley lecture highlights compelling, original research in scholarly and creative work and is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty can confer upon one of their peers. Established in 1957, the lecture was named in 1979 to honor the memory of Edwin M. Moseley, whose 17 years at Skidmore capped a distinguished 41-year career in higher education. Moseley had come to Skidmore in 1961 as professor of English and as the College’s first dean of the faculty. A noted scholar, author, and teacher specializing in Renaissance and modern literature, Moseley had been selected in 1967 by his fellow faculty members to give what was then known as the Annual Faculty Research Lecture.