FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jan. 26, 2007

Kathleen McPartland
530-898-4260

Historian Laird Easton Receives Prestigious Fellowship

Laird Easton, Department of History at California State University, Chico, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the academic year 2007-2008. This will permit him to concentrate entirely on finishing his translation of "The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918," currently under contract with Alfred A. Knopf.

Easton is the author of "The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler" (University of California Press, 2002), which received national and international acclaim. It received reviews in "Harper's Magazine," "The New York Times Book Review," "The New York Review of Books" and "The (London) Times Literary Supplement," among others. "The New York Review of Books" selected it for the "Reader's Catalogue," a list of the most important books in print by category.

Kessler's journals are now being published in Germany for the first time, said Easton. "One of the best things about all of this is the pleasure of knowing I am going to make this amazing diary available for the English-reading world," said Easton.

"Kessler, whom W. H. Auden called 'perhaps the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived,' was a wealthy, well-connected Anglo-German art patron, museum director and cultural critic," said Easton. "During the first World War, he served as a soldier, cultural attaché and secret agent. Afterwards he became a well-known pacifist and internationalist, dying in exile from the Third Reich in 1937. His greatest work was his diary."

Easton joins a handful of Humanities and Fine Arts faculty who have won prestigious NEH fellowships in recent years, including his colleague Judith Raftery, Department of History, and Matthew Looper, Department of Art and Art History, both for the academic year 2005-2006. The fellowship is a national scholarly competition that offers $40,000 over a 9-12-month period.

Easton came to Chico in 1991 from Stanford University, where he received a PhD in European history. He worked as an acquisitions editor for the University of California Press after he received a master's degree from Stanford in 1982. He did his undergraduate work at Cornell University, graduating magna cum laude and with distinction in 1978. He was named CSU, Chico's Outstanding Professor for 2003-2004.

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