David Lowenthal was awarded the 2016 British Academy medal for The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2015). The medal honors “a landmark academic achievement which has transformed understanding in the humanities and social sciences” in a book that explores “the manifold ways in which history engages, illuminates and deceives us in the here and now.”

David Lowenthal engages a panel during “Author Meets Critic: The Past is a Foreign Country—Revisited,” a special session at the 2016 AAG annual meeting in San Francisco.

Lowenthal, emeritus professor of geography and honorary research fellow at University College London, was invited to the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco for a special “Author Meets Critics” session. There he talked about The Past is a Foreign Country—Revisited before panelists Diana K. Davis (UC Davis), Marie D. Price (George Washington University), and Dydia Delyser (CSU Fullerton), gave their understandings and opinions on the book.

The British Academy medal is greatly deserved for his work. Thirty years ago he wrote The Past Is a Foreign Country, which became a classic text. The Revisited text explores anew how we celebrate, expunge, contest and manipulate the past. He reveals the past as an almost entirely new realm, so transformed over three decades as to demand an equally new book.