Historian to Deliver Alan Berkman Memorial Lecture at Columbia

Photo Submitted

Vintage Soviet advertisement for "Our Brand" cigarettes. Courtesy Russian State Library.

On May 4, professor Trish Starks of the Department of History will deliver the Alan Berkman Memorial Lecture at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. In her lecture, "Cigarettes and Soviets: Communism, Capitalism, and Tobacco Uptake," Starks will explore the assumed links between advertising, product manipulation and industrial design against the backdrop of sustained tobacco use under the Soviet system.

The lecture will challenge public health assumptions about cessation techniques and encourage dialogue about how to best fight a product that results in the death of half its users and which still ensnares nearly one in four adults in the world. Starks' lecture builds on material from Starks' previous books — Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia and Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR.

The Alan Berkman Memorial Lecture was established in 2009 to honor an esteemed colleague. Berkman's obituary in The Lancet detailed how Berkman combined his medical training with civil rights activism, treating injured inmates from the Attica uprisings in 1971, protesters from Wounded Knee in 1974 and Black Liberation Army members in 1981. He was incarcerated for refusing to testify against his patients and later served eight years in federal prison, half in solitary. In 1992 he was released from federal prison and moved into AIDS treatment and activism and then on to Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health in 2007. This lecture honors his legacy as a "teacher, scholar, mentor, AIDS physician and crusader for social justice."

The Alan Berkman Memorial Lecture is part of the Columbia University Epidemiology Grand Rounds lecture series. At the Grand Rounds scholars and scientists from around the world are invited to share ideas and participate in interdisciplinary conversations with faculty, students and the general public regarding population health. Previous Grand Rounds speakers have included Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, author Harriet Washington, activist Bill McKibben and environmentalist Jacqueline Patterson.