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September 23, 2005|Volume 34, Number 4


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Robin Winks



Event celebrates the legacy of the late historian, mystery buff and parks enthusiast Robin Winks

The late Yale professor Robin Winks once wrote: "The historian has only three requirements of any historical source: that it be interesting, that it be significant, and preferably that it be true."

Fellow scholars and former students will pay tribute to Winks' life and work at a memorial conference titled "Interesting, Significant and True: Robin Winks and the Profession of History," to be held Saturday, Oct. 1, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. in the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), 320 York St. The event is free and open to the public.

The conference will commemorate Winks' legacy as a scholar and teacher, as well as his contributions to the United States through his service in the U.S. Embassy in London and his decades-long involvement with the National Park Service. It is jointly sponsored by International Security Studies at Yale, the Department of History, and Berkeley College, where Winks served as master for two terms.

"Robin was such a force at Yale and in [the Department of] History, from the moment of his arrival as a faculty member in 1957, that it is all but impossible to describe his unending impact upon all of us beyond what we know immediately -- that we stood in awe of Robin's unbounded energy, his care for teaching, his aspirations for both Yale and History, and a scholarship incomparable in its range and depth," wrote Jon Butler, former chair of the history department and now dean of the Graduate School, about his colleague.

The conference is organized around four panels -- two focusing on Winks' teaching and programmatic interests at Yale, and two on his work as a scholar.

The first panel, "The Art of Teaching at Yale" at 9 a.m., will pay tribute to Winks' dedication as a teacher. It will feature four Yale historians: Jon Butler, who will chair the panel; Professor Steven Stoll, who will speak on the teaching of U.S. environmental and conservation history; Professor Jay Gitlin, on teaching about the U.S. West and Canada; and Professor John Lewis Gaddis, on the teaching of U.S. international and Cold War history.

The second panel, "Mysteries, in Fiction and Fact" at 11 a.m., will examine Winks' interest in mystery fiction, but will focus on his book "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in America's Secret War," the prize-winning history of the Yale origins of the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe will chair the panel, which will feature scholar David Kahn, Professor John Hollander of Yale and Professor Timothy Naftali of the University of Virginia.

Professor John Demos of Yale will lead the third panel, "On the Writing of History" at 1:30 p.m., which will feature a discussion by Winks' former students about how their education was shaped by the histories they read in the historian's seminar on "The Writing of History."

The final panel, "Britain, the British Empire and the Commonwealth" at 3:30 p.m., will be chaired by Professor Keith Wrightson of Yale, and will feature Professor William Roger Louis of the University of Texas at Austin, on Winks' contributions to the history of the British Empire, and Professor Sarah-Jane Mathieu of Princeton University, on Winks' interest in U.S./Canadian history. Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale will end the panel and the conference with a talk on Winks' service to the United States as cultural attaché at the London Embassy and his experiences as an "American abroad."

All the panels will be held in Rm. 211 of HGS. A video of public lectures by Winks will run continuously in Rm. 401.

Winks, who died in April of 2003, was the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History. He was a noted scholar in a wide range of subjects, including British imperial history, Canadian-American relations, comparative American history, conservation history, and the theory and development of espionage. He served as U.S. cultural attaché to the American Embassy in London 1969-1971. He was an enthusiastic supporter of and adviser to the National Park Service, which awarded him its first gold medal for contributions to public education on behalf of the nation's national parks and established an annual prize in his name. Winks was also a regular detective novel reviewer for the Boston Globe and The New Republic.


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