The W. Bruce Lincoln Lecture will be held on Monday 29 September 2014 at 7:30 p.m. in Altgeld Auditorium at Northern Illinois University.

This year’s speaker is Deborah Cohen, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History, Northwestern University. Her lecture is entitled, “FAMILY SECRETS: SHAME AND PRIVACY IN BRITAIN.”

Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Deborah Cohen was educated at Harvard (BA) and Berkeley (Ph.D.).  Her specialty is modern European history, with a focus on Britain.

Her first book, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, was published by the University of California in 2001, and awarded the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Prize. Her second book, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions, was published by Yale University Press in 2006; it won the American Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize for the best book on Britain after 1485 and was the co-winner of the North American Conference on British Studies’ Albion prize for the best book on Britain after 1800. Cohen has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies (Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Her most recent book, Family Secrets, was published in 2013 by Viking Penguin in the UK and by Oxford University Press in the US. It has been named a “Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times [London], the Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator.