THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY, How Historians Map the Past
For reading a book, Please sign in to your account.
loginThe University of Oxfordhas again provided a hospitable set-ting in which to write a book. The occasion this time was the 2000/1George Eastman Visiting Professorship in Balliol College, a chair dat-ing back to 1929whose occupants have included Felix Frankfurter,Linus Pauling, Willard Quine, George F. Kennan, Lionel Trilling, Clif-ford Geertz, William H. McNeill, Natalie Zemon Davis, and RobinWinks. As befits a position with such diverse and distinguished prede-cessors, the Eastman electors do not find it necessary to provide cur-rent chairholders with detailed instructions as to what they areexpected to do. My own letter of appointment specified only “partici-pation in twenty-four academic functions during the three terms ofthe academic year.” It then added, accurately enough as I discovered,“that the Eastman Professor enjoys considerable scope for flexibility inadjusting the pedagogical activities in combination with scholarly proj-ects which the holder may wish to pursue.”
