The talk, "Partnerships for the Future Built on the Past: How Professors and K-12 Teachers Together Can Revive the Study of History," will be presented at 6:00 pm in room 235 of the University Memorial Center on the CU-Boulder campus. The event is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow.

Wrobel, a professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, will discuss recent and future concerns about education, particularly in the field of history. "Too often, university-based academics simply lament the shortcomings of the public schools; Wrobel, by contrast, finds much to celebrate in the skills and dedication of today's teachers, while investing his own time in the project of sharing the deepest and most thought-provoking scholarship with teachers and other public audiences," said Professor Patricia Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West.

Wrobel served as co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Institute for Teachers at CU- Boulder in 2001 and has been a faculty coordinator and core member of the Center of the American West's Teaching American History partnership with the Jefferson County Public Schools since 2001.

British by birth and a naturalized U.S . citizen, Wrobel "is a witty commentator on American habits and customs," Limerick said. He is the 2005-06 Senior Research Fellow in Western American History at Yale University and is the author of The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety From the Old West to the New Deal, and Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory and the Creation of the American West.

Wrobel's appearance is part of a series of events celebrating the CU-Boulder Center of the American West's 20th anniversary this year.