2025 Writer-In-Residence

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst / Five College Graduate Program in History is pleased to announce that our 2025 Writer-in-Residence is historian Alan Taylor, who will be on campus April 6-11, 2025. He has published eleven books and is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History, among other awards. Dr. Taylor will give the UMass/Five College Annual Distinguished Lecture in History, "American Civil Wars: Canadian Dimensions," on Tuesday, April 8 at 6:00PM in the Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall.

The history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is dedicated to the idea that an understanding of the past is essential to living in a vibrant democracy. As a measure of that commitment, the Department of History's Writer-in-Residence program facilitates sustained conversation with widely-read authors whose historical work engages broad public audiences.

Each year, with major funding from Five Colleges, Inc., the history department brings a writer of national prominence to campus for a week-long residency in order to give focused attention in our graduate training to writing for a range of audiences and in a variety of venues well beyond the monograph or scholarly article. Writers in Residence visit courses and seminars, meet with students and faculty over coffee, lunches, and dinners, and deliver a public lecture. The residency is embedded within our signature seminars, Writing History and History Communication. In this way, graduate students from UMass Amherst expand their ability to write for a wider array of readers, sharing the insights of our discipline both within the academy and well beyond.