Mary Stevens Reckford Lecture on European Studies

Mary Stevens Reckford
February 25, 1934-November 12, 1987

The IAH hosts the Mary Stevens Reckford Lecture on European Studies, established in 1990 by UNC Classics Professor Kenneth J. Reckford to honor his wife, Mary Stevens Reckford.

The lecture is designed to appeal to educated lay people, rather than specialists. Speakers are asked to provide “pleasure, instruction, an interdisciplinary approach and a sense of shared humanity.”

A graduate of Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mary Reckford took graduate courses at UNC through the Evening College for five years, studying such topics as Renaissance intellectual history, St. Augustine, sixteenth-century English literature, Arthurian literature, the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, and the history of science from the late-medieval period through the eighteenth century. She was mother to the Reckford’s five children, Rachel, Joseph, Jonathan, Sam and Sarah.

 
Reckford Lecturers

• 2008 - Joan W. Scott, Harold F. Lindner Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study
• 2007 - Caroline Walker Bynum, Professor of Western European Middle Ages, Princeton University
• 2003 - Kenneth J. Reckford, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2001 - Jaquelin T. Robertson, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
• 2000 - Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States, Professor, Graduate Writing Program, Boston University
• 1999 - Peter Burke, Professor of Cultural History and Fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University
• 1998 - Natalie Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Princeton University
• 1997 - Lynn Hunt, Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
• 1996 - Peter Brown, Philip and Beulah Rollins, Professors of History, Princeton University
• 1995 - Carlo Ginzburg, Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies, University of California
• 1994 - Peter Paret, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton University 
• 1993 - Robert Darnton, Professor of European History and Director of The Program in European Cultural Studies, Princeton University
• 1992 - Alvatore I. Camporeale, Professor at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and Johns Hopkins University
• 1991 - Rona Goffen, Professor of Art History, Rutgers University
• 1990 - Nancy S. Streuver, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University