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Historian Starr to Speak at OCSF
Author and California historian Kevin Starr will be the featured speaker at the April 2 Occidental College Speakers Forum at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena.
An 11:30 a.m. reception will precede the noon luncheon in the hotel’s Viennese Ballroom. The Ritz-Carlton is located at 1401 S. Oak Knoll Ave. Tickets for the luncheon are $35 per person ($20 for Oxy GOLD members). For reservations or additional information, contact Occidental Special Events at (323) 259-1456 or events@oxy.edu. Please RSVP by March 21.
A fourth-generation Californian, San Francisco native Starr is regarded as the nation’s leading expert on California history. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1962 and earned a master’s degree in history and a Ph.D in philosophy from Harvard, as well as a master’s of library science from UC Berkeley. As an American historian, Starr is most renowned for his multi-volume series on the history of California, “America and the California Dream.” His most recent work, “California: A History” (2005), was called “a classic” by The Economist.
While working on his own series of history volumes, Starr also served for 10 years as California state librarian, and in 2004 he was named state librarian emeritus by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. In addition to his many honors and awards – including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize nomination – Starr was most recently honored by President Bush with the 2006 National Humanities Medal, which “honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities.” Currently, Starr is a history professor at USC.