Durham, NC - Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize -- winning economist whose work has explored poverty, inequality, and human rights, will deliver an address in Duke's Goodson Chapel at 4 p.m. on Friday, March 26.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Sen will speak on "The Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith" as part of a two-day event marking the 40th anniversary of the journal History of Political Economy and the editorship of Craufurd D. Goodwin, an economics professor at Duke and the only editor of the journal in its history. Duke University Press publishes the quarterly journal.

Sen is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, and a former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics, a normative branch of the discipline concerned with what economic activity ought to achieve. His 1970 book "Collective Choice and Social Welfare" criticized much economic analysis for privileging efficiency over equity and justice.

The event is sponsored by several Duke units: the Center for the History of Political Economy; Department of Economics; Office of the President; Office of the Provost; Duke University Press; the Trent Foundation; Divinity School; Office of International Affairs; and the Johnson Lecture Fund.