John A. Kirk, the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, presented " Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912-1956" at 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 22, at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Science.
Why did Winthrop Rockefeller, the scion of a wealthy and influential New York family, move to an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s? Kirk draws upon his deeply researched new book to examine the clues to this mystery, which, he argues, are threaded throughout Rockefeller’s New York life. In so doing, Kirk casts a powerful new light on Rockefeller’s later Arkansas years, where, in 1966, he was elected the state’s first Republican governor in almost a century.Kirk taught at the University of Wales and the University of London in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in the summer of 2010. He served for five years as chair of the UA Little Rock History Department and for four years as director of the Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity.
Kirk has authored, edited, or co-edited ten books, and published in a wide variety of journals, edited book collections, newspapers, and magazines. He has held several grants and fellowships in both Europe and the United States, including as Roosevelt Study Centre Fellow (Middleburg, The Netherlands), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Fellow, and Rockefeller Archive Center Scholar-in-Residence.
© Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas
