Oct. 10, 2007 – Dr. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, pre-eminent historian of early America and the history of women, will deliver this year’s O. Meredith Wilson Lecture, to be held on Thursday, Oct. 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Dumke Auditorium, Utah Museum of Fine Arts Marcia and John Price Museum Building, on the University of Utah campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Ulrich’s lecture, titled “A Woman and a Cow: Celebrating a Renaissance in History,” will explore the rediscovery of women’s experience in the past generation of historical scholarship. “People not only make history by what they do, but by what they choose to remember,” states Ulrich, who explains that the journey into the past seven centuries of women’s work is made possible by the remarkable flowering in scholarship that followed the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Ulrich’s innovative and widely influential approach to history has been described as a tribute to “the silent work of ordinary people,” an approach that, in her words, aims to “show the interconnection between public events and private experience.”

The James Duncan Philips Professor of American History at Harvard University, Ulrich is a graduate of the University of Utah and a renowned historian of women in early America. She is a former MacArthur Fellow whose book, A Midwife’s Tale, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991. The Age of Homespun (2001) was described by Michael Kammen as “a unique work of astonishing originality.” Her newest book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Born in Sugar City, Idaho, Ulrich self-identifies as an active feminist and Mormon and has written with great insight about her experiences. She co-edited with Emma Lou Thayne a collection of essays about the lives of Mormon women entitled, All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir.

The annual Wilson Lecture was created at the University of Utah in 1976 under the auspices of the Tanner Lecture Trust at the request of Obert C. Tanner. Its namesake, O. Meredith Wilson, was a professor of history at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago before going on to serve as president of the University of Oregon, the University of Minnesota and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.