Dr. Christopher Catherwood, noted Churchill author and Archives Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge, will deliver the 2008 Kemper Lecture a 2 p.m., Sunday, April 13, in the Church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury on the Westminster College campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. The topic for Dr. Catherwood’s lecture is “Winston Churchill and the Creation of Modern Iraq.”
Following the lecture, Catherwood will autograph his book, Churchill’s Folly: Winston Churchill and the Creation of Iraq, at a reception in the Undercroft. This book was based entirely upon original archival research from the War Office, Colonial Office and Cabinet office papers found at the Churchill Archive in Cambridge.
Those attending the lecture will also be treated to the opening of a new exhibit in the Undercroft entitled “Churchill after Victory and Defeat: 1945-1955.” The exhibit reveals selected correspondence from the collections of The Winston Churchill Memorial and Library in the United States at Westminster College and The Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge University.
Catherwood’s new book for the Berkley imprint of Penguin Putnam, entitled Churchill: The True Story, will be finished this year. The book is a sympathetic biography of Churchill, which sets out the argument that had General Marshall prevailed in several key arguments, the war would have finished earlier. The volume also holds that Churchill was right on Munich and that many of his strategic errors in the early Forties stem from an old fashioned geopolitical outlook and not realizing the extent to which the world had changed.
Catherwood is a Key Supervisor in History at Homerton College Cambridge and has been a Director of Studies for the Junior Year Abroad program since 2006. He has served as a tutor in history for the Institute of Economic and Political Studies since 1997 and has been a summer school teacher for continuing studies and summer writer in residence for the history department of the University of Richmond since 1999.
Catherwood received his PH.D by publication with the University of East Anglia and holds a Master of Literature from Sidney Sussex College Cambridge and a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts from Balliol College Oxford.