image of Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall

The Vietnam War will be the topic of the Robert G. Bone Distinguished Lecture by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. On Thursday, April 20, Fredrik Logevall will present “Making Sense of the Vietnam War” at 7 p.m. in the Caterpillar Auditorium of the State Farm Hall of Business. Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and a professor of history.

A specialist on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history, he was previously the Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as the director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Before that he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-founded the Center for Cold War Studies.

Logevall is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize, as well as the 2013 American Library in Paris Book Award and the 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations.

His other recent works include America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, and the college-level textbook A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. A native of Stockholm, Sweden, Logevall holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale University. He is immediate past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

The talk is part of the Illinois State University Speaker Series. The series seeks to bring innovative and enlightening speakers to the campus with the aim of providing the community with a platform to foster dialogue, cultivate enriching ideas, and continue an appreciation of learning as an active and lifelong process. All talks are free and open to the public.