Victor Davis Hanson to speak at Lehigh

	Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an internationally known author and columnist, and a military historian, will speak about modern wars in a classical context on April 6 in Whitaker Laboratory’s Auditorium at 7 p.m.
The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the College Republicans, the Visiting Lectures Committee, the Lehigh history department, and The Lehigh Patriot.
“I think it’s really important to have speakers like Hanson here at Lehigh because Hanson’s message—aside from being delivered by one of the leading scholars in the field—is one that Lehigh students do not often get to hear regarding war and war’s impact on the America and the world in general, says Neal Hoffman, the former Speaker Coordinator of Lehigh's College Republicans.
In addition to his regular work as a columnist for the conservative National Review Online and as a nationally syndicated columnist for the Tribune Media Services, Hanson is perhaps best known for the latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, which was written in October 2005.
The book was hailed by the New York Times as a “highly original, strikingly contemporary retelling of the superpower confrontation” that makes the past “almost painfully present.”
An earlier book, Carnage and Culture, also focused on historical clashes and examines nine battles through history. In it, Hanson argues that the military dominance of Western Civilization is the result of certain fundamental aspects of Western culture. Although written prior to the events of September 11, 2001, Hanson’s view of a “Western way of war” that ultimately prevails catapulted the book onto the best-seller list.
A prolific writer who focuses on agrarian and military history, foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture, Hanson recently left a teaching post at Fresno State (Calif.) University, where he served for more than 20 years and initiated the university’s classics program.
He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Fellow in California Studies at Claremont Institute. Hanson has also been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a visiting professor of classics at Stanford, and the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
His list of awards includes the American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 1991, and the Eric Breindel Award for Opinion Journalism in 2002.
Hanson received his bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1975, and received his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University in 1980. He lives and works with his family on a 40-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, Calif.
For more information about Hanson and his writings, please go online.

--Linda Harbrecht