David Lowenthal, a former Chilmark seasonal visitor, has been awarded the 2016 British Academy Medal for his book, The Past Is a Foreign Country-Revisited, which was reviewed in the Gazette this past summer.

The British Academy citation called the book “a landmark academic achievement which has transformed understanding in the humanities and social sciences, revealing the manifold ways in which history engages, illuminates, and deceives us in the here and now.”

Dr. Lowenthal, a professor emeritus of geography at University College in London, and also at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a number of summers on the Island in the 1930s and revisited in the 1960s.