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CORVALLIS, Ore. - One of the nation's leading Renaissance historians will deliver the annual George and Dorothy Carson History Lecture at Oregon State University on Monday, April 10.

The talk by Anthony Grafton, "Times Past: Visions of World History in Pre-Modern Europe," begins at 7 p.m. in the LaSells Stewart Center's Construction and Engineering Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

Grafton is a professor of history at Princeton University, where he also chairs the university's Council of the Humanities. He has taught and studied the intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Europe for 30 years while at Princeton, focusing on historical thought and scholarship, the history of education - and the history of magic.

He has written four books and contributed regularly to the American Scholar, The New Republic and other publications.

In his OSU lecture, Grafton will confront the challenges of teaching and addressing "world history" in an era of globalization - and compare it to the era of 1450 to 1700, where scholars also struggled with new knowledge about a shrinking world.

The Carson Lecture is named after the late George Carson, a long-time professor of Russian history at OSU, and his wife, Dorothy.