Symposium 2001 - Professor Norman Davies

An English-Irish-Scottish-Welsh Perspective. Speech presented at the NSW Centenary of Federation, Holding Together Series of International Speakers.

Professor Norman Davies, author and academic, is also a well known lecturer and broadcaster.

Born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1939, he is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford where he was a pupil of A.J.P. Taylor. He was associated with the universities at Grenoble, Perugia, Sussex and Cracow, where he obtained his PhD.

He made his name in the academic world with several works on Poland and Russia including, White Eagle, Red Star (1972), God's Playground: A History of Poland (1981) and Heart of Europe (1984).

A Professor at the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London, he has been a visiting professor at McGill (Canada), Columbia (New York), Hokkaido (Japan), Beijing (China), Stanford (California) and Harvard universities.

More recently he has written Europe: A History (1996), a ground-breaking work which became an international bestseller and The Isles: A History (1999) which has made a major contribution to the debate on Britishness.

He is currently working on a study of the Second World War in Europe.

He has been made a Supernumary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and is a Fellow both of the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy.

He possesses several honorary doctorates, is an honorary citizen of Cracow and Lublin in Poland and is a Commander of Poland's Order of Merit and Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.

Norman Davies has many close links and good friends in Australia.

He first came to Australia as a guest of the Adelaide Festival in 1997 when he presented the Festival Lecture on Europe Overseas and Overland.

He returned in 1998-1999 as a visiting scholar at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Adelaide.

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