The annual R. Kirk Underhill Lecture at UC Berkeley features a leading figure or figures from political or scholarly circles speaking on US and UK political, legal, or cultural affairs. The Underhill Lecture is sponsored by the Anglo-American Studies Program.
April 9, 2025
How did the core institutions of American government emerge and evolve? What political commitments are embedded in the foundation of these institutions? Drawing on his new book Agents of Empire, Sean Gailmard traces these questions to English colonial governance in North America.
How did the core institutions of American government emerge and evolve? What political commitments are embedded in the foundation of these institutions? Drawing on his new book Agents of Empire, Sean Gailmard traces these questions to English colonial governance in North America. He argues that colonization required the English crown to delegate state functions to agents on the ground—first companies and proprietors; then state officials—but thereby introduced tensions between the interests of the crown and its agents of colonization. The study analyzes how colonial institutions emerged from the crown’s strategic problems of managing these tensions, and ultimately its attempts to increase its wealth and status as an imperial power. The institutions remaining from these strategic dynamics form the building blocks of federalism, legislative power, separation of powers, judicial review, and other institutions that comprise the American polity today.
Sean Gailmard is the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy in the Political Science Department at UC Berkeley. Professor Gailmard studies how political institutions operate, change, and affect governance quality. His work focuses particularly on the evolution of US institutions, the executive branch, checks and balances across branches of government, and bureaucratic capacity. Gailmard applies strategic and historical perspectives to these issues. Professor Gailmard is the author of Agents of Empire: English Imperial Governance and the Making of American Political Institutions, as well as Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch (winner of Best Book awards from APSA sections on Political Economy and Public Administration). He has published research in leading social science journals.
April 9, 2024
Winston Churchill is 150 years young. Born in 1874, he continues to arouse passions in our own day – lauded for his leadership against Nazism, castigated for his colonial worldview. He’s often portrayed as a solitary genius, standing alone, but this lecture will show how his path to greatness was shaped by his encounters with other leaders. Men whom he admired, such as David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt; others who got in his way: notably Adolf Hitler; and some whom he misread, especially Josef Stalin. One woman was also indispensable: his wife Clementine. Marriage to Winston proved exhausting but it made her a leader in her own right.
David Reynolds is an award-winning historian and Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge University (Christ’s College). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. Author of fourteen books, ranging across British, US and European history in the twentieth century, his most recent works include Island Stories: Britain and its history in the age of Brexit (2019) and Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him (2023)
April 3, 2023
Lady Brenda Hale retired as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the most senior Judge in the United Kingdom, in January 2020. Before becoming a Judge, she had a varied career, as an academic lawyer at the University of Manchester, as the first woman member of the Law Commission, where she led successful projects in Family Law and Mental Capacity Law. She was appointed a High Court Judge in 1994, was promoted to the Court of Appeal in 1999, and in 2004 became the first and only woman ‘Law Lord’ in the House of Lords, then the apex court in the United Kingdom. In 2009, the Law Lords were translated into the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. She became its Deputy President in 2013 and its first woman President in 2017. She holds a number of honorary and visiting academic appointments, several honorary degrees, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her memoir, Spiderwoman, A Life, was published in 2021.
April 3, 2019
Dr. Kori Schake is Deputy Director-General, International Institute for Strategic Studies; Author of Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Harvard University Press 2017); contributing editor at The Atlantic and War on the Rocks. Dr. Schake has held policy positions across government, academia and think tanks, including working with both the military and civilian staffs of the Pentagon, in the White House at the National Security Council, and at the US State Department as Deputy Head of Policy Planning.
January 16, 2018
Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times, London.
October 13, 2016
Niall Ferguson has explored extensively the histories of the UK and the US in best-selling books such as Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, both of which were made into British television series. Adding to his lineup of 14 published books, Ferguson released in 2015 the first volume of the authorized biography of Henry Kissinger entitled Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist. Ferguson is a frequent commentator on current events, writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe. Ferguson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
May 7, 2015
On the day of one of the UK’s most highly anticipated elections, Lord Patten of Barnes will address the state of the US-UK relationship and what this relationship means for the world.
Spanning his career as a leader of the Conservative Party, the Governor of Hong Kong, and now as Chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Patten combines his insider knowledge about British politics with the international perspective of a diplomat to track the evolving special relationship between the two countries.
This lecture is the inaugural R. Kirk Underhill Lecture. The R. Kirk Underhill Lecture brings a leading figure from political or scholarly circles in the United Kingdom to UC Berkeley to discuss British affairs and their implications for the United States.