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GSA 2015 ANNUAL MEETING & EXPOSITION
Special Lecture
William Smith: The Man, His Map and the Democratization of Geology
Simon Winchester After spending just a year as a geologist in East Africa, Oxford
graduate Simon Winchester turned to journalism and spent 30
Sun., 1 Nov., 4–5 p.m. years as a foreign correspondent working around the world for
Baltimore Convention Center, The Guardian and The Sunday Times of London. In 1998,
Room 327/328/329 following the unexpected success of his book about nineteenth-
century lexicography, The Professor and the Madman, Winchester
To pluck William Smith from two centuries became a full-time writer, and has now published 27 books, many
of dusty obscurity and place him, quite of them New York Times best-sellers. In 2006, for services to litera-
rightly, on a pedestal as one of the truly great ture, he was awarded officership of the Order of the British
men of his time was the task confronting Simon Winchester Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. His latest book, Pacific,
when, in 2000, he decided to write the remarkable story of the will be released on 27 Oct. 2015.
so-called Father of English Geology. The saga he uncovered was
poignant and inspiring: The manner in which he—nearly forty
years after graduating with a geology degree from Oxford, but in
no sense a practitioner of the science—came to the tale in the first
place, turns out to be every bit as amusing as it is instructive.
SCIENCE & CAREERS
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communi t y.geosociet y.org / gsa2 015
