British Academy Medal awarded to CUP author David Lowenthal

American historian and geographer David Lowenthal, has won a coveted British Academy Medal in recognition of his book The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited which was published by Cambridge in 2015.

The British Academy Medals have been awarded annually since 2013 in recognition of outstanding achievement in the humanities and social sciences.

The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited returns to Lowenthal’s original publication more than 25 years later. Lowenthal revisits how man celebrates, expunges, contests and domesticates the past to serve present needs. Drawing on the arts, humanities and social sciences, and on diverse sources such as science fiction and psychoanalysis, he shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture.

Lowenthal  is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, a Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary D. Litt. Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is a gold medal recipient of the Royal Geographical, the Royal Scottish Geographical and American Geographical Societies, and in 2010 was awarded the Forbes Lecture Prize by the International Institute for Conservation.  Lowenthal’s previous works include The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996), George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conversation (2000) and the Nature of Cultural Heritage and the Culture of National Heritage (2005).

The Medal was awarded at a ceremony at the British Academy on September 27 2016.

Words by Georgie Sloan, September 2016

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