Historian Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., delivers the 2024 George Rogers Clark Lecture. Drawing mainly from objects featured in our current exhibition, Fete Lafayette: A French Hero’s Tour of the American Republic, Dr. Auricchio explores how the marquis de Lafayette and his tour, along with Alexander Hamilton and the Society of the Cincinnati, helped foster American manufacturing and global trade. Presented annually since 1975, the Society of the Cincinnati’s George Rogers Clark Lecture recognizes the scholarship of leading historians of the American Revolution. Recent Clark Lecturers include Gen. David Petraeus, Andrew Roberts, Nick Bunker, Rick Atkinson, Kathleen DuVal, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy.
About the Speaker
Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., is a specialist in art and history of France and the United States in the Age of Revolution, who received her Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University. After serving five years as the Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, she was appointed as Vice President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2024. In addition to dozens of articles, book sections, exhibition catalog entries, book reviews, and exhibition reviews, op-eds, and other short-form writings, she has published one co-edited volume and two single-authored books: Adelaide Labille Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009, and The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2014, that was awarded the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2015. Dr. Auricchio is an active scholar whose work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, Whiting, and Earhart Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the New York Council for the Humanities, and the New York State Council for the Arts.