By: Michael French, UC Davis College of Letters & Science
The annual Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Pulitzer prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum on Monday, February 9, 2026, from 4-6 pm at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. The event (including reception) is free and open to the public.
Her talk, “Autocracy, Inc. — or Democrats United?” is based on her most recent book, the bestselling Autocracy, Inc. (2025): “All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated national and transnational networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and professional propagandists. They don’t share an ideology, but they do have a common goal: to defeat the ideas and language of liberal democracy, inside their own countries and around the world. This lecture will examine this network and describe how it has shaped the world – and the United States.”
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic and Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her previous books include the Pulitzer-prize winning Gulag: A History; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. She has been a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post, as well as Foreign and Deputy Editor at the Spectator, and writes for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Criterion and The Guardian.
The Lunn Lectureship commemorates Eugene Lunn, a member of the UC Davis Department of History who distinguished himself as an incisive scholar and beloved teacher in the field of modern European intellectual history. In his memory, a fund was created to support an annual lecture series bringing notable speakers to campus to address significant cultural issues from a historical perspective.
The lecture series has become an important yearly event at UC Davis, and we would like to acknowledge the kind support of our co-sponsors; the Lunn & Gatoff families; Pi Sigma Alpha – Delta Upsilon; and individual donors.
The Department of History is part of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science.
