Noted historian and best-selling author Blanche Wiesen Cook to lecture at Fairfield University | Press Releases

Blanche Wiesen Cook, Ph.D., a best-selling historian and women's history pioneer, will deliver "Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights" on Tuesday, March 30, at 7 p.m. at Fairfield University. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the Oak Room of the Barone Campus Center. It is sponsored by the Women's Studies Program, History Department, American Studies Program and a grant from the Humanities Council of Fairfield University.

Dr. Cook, a history professor at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is one of the country's leading Eleanor Roosevelt scholars. She is at work on her third book on the former first lady, having analyzed her contributions in "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume I, 1884-1933" and "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II, The Defining Years 1933-1938."

Dr. Cook established herself as a leading historian not long after attaining her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1970. After covering women's history, lesbianism and feminism in several groundbreaking journal articles, she wrote "The Declassified Eisenhower," which made The New York Times Book Review list of notable books of 1981.

For the last 22 years, Dr. Cook has devoted much of her attention to Roosevelt. The third book in her trilogy is highly anticipated.

In addition to her writing and teaching, Dr. Cook has served as vice president for research for the American Historical Association and vice president and chair of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability, and she co-founded the Freedom of Information and Access Committee of the Organization of American Historians. In 1996, the New York State Council on the Humanities named her Scholar of the Year and she has received the Biography Prize from the Los Angeles Times and the Lambda Literary Award.