Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, Benjamin West c. 1816 - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Update: The location of the Inaugural Benjamin Franklin Project Lecture has been moved from the MTCC Auditorium to the Hermann Hall Auditorium.

A live webcast of the lecture will be available here.

The IIT College of Science and Letters Department of Social Sciences proudly announces the inaugural event of the new Benjamin Franklin Project with one of America’s most distinguished historians.  The Inaugural Benjamin Franklin Project Lecture, “What Made the Founders Different,” will be be presented by Brown University Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus of History Gordon S. Wood at 4 pm on Thursday, March 15 in the Hermann Hall Auditorium, followed by a reception following.

RSVP here by March 8 to attend.

Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University. Wood taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.

He is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. In 2010 he received the National Humanities Medal. Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

The Benjamin Franklin Project at IIT
As one of the United States’ Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin is known for his vision, his wit, his love of life, his expert knowledge in governance, science, engineering, business, education, music, and philosophy, and the treasure trove of writings, discoveries, inventions, and ideas that he left behind.

In partnership with the Jack Miller Center and with the generous support of The Brinson Foundation, the College of Science and Letters and the Department of Social Sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) have launched the Benjamin Franklin Project to inspire a new generation of innovators who wish to think—and act—across today’s disciplinary and professional lines.  Read more