Forum: Shifting Sands: The Middle East in Upheaval

KENNETH M. POLLACK, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings is an expert on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf.  He was director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council.  He also spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian guld military analyst.  He is the author of “A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East."

Forum: Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President

ELI SASLOW is a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he covered the 2008 presidential campaign and has chronicled the president’s life inside the White House. Previously a sportswriter for the Post, he has won multiple awards for news and feature writing. Two of his stories have also appeared in Best American Sports Writing.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Forum: U.S. Intelligence in the Wake of September 11:The Rise of the Spy Commando

FREDERICK P. HITZ served as CIA inspector general and is currently a senior fellow at the Center for National Security Law at the U.Va. School of Law. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Hitz entered the Career Training Program at the CIA and served in the clandestine service in Africa. In 1974, he returned to law practice but re-entered government service in congressional liaison capacities with the State, Defense, and Energy departments before resuming his CIA career as legislative counsel to the director of Central Intelligence.

Forum: The Black History of the White House

CLARENCE LUSANE is an associate professor of Political Science in the School of International Service at American University where he teaches and researches on international human rights, comparative race relations, social movements and electoral politics.  He is also an author, activist, scholar, lecturer, and journalist.  A book signing will follow his Forum. 

Forum: Vladimir Putin and Russian Statescraft

Since Russian leader Vladimir Putin assumed power in August 1999, speculation about his character, motives, and plans for Russia’s future has been rampant in the West. Even after he stepped down as president in May 2008, retaining a significant measure of power as prime minister under his hand-picked successor, President Dmitri Medvedev, Putin remains poorly understood. In this interpretive biography of Putin, ALLEN C. LYNCH, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies and associate professor of Government and Foreign Affairs seeks to reconcile the two conflicting images and find out just where the truth lies about the man and the statesman.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Forum: Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War

FRANK COSTIGLIOLA is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut.  He is  a recipient of fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute.  In  2002 he received the Chancellor's award for excellence in research and the Alumni Association's award for excellence in research. In 2009, he served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). This is the Gordon and Mary Beth Smyth History Forum.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Forum: Civility in American Politics: How to Get (Some of) it Back

JONATHAN HAIDT is associate professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is also the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Forum: George F. Kennan: An American Life

JOHN LEWIS GADDIS is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy, who has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Colloquium: When the World Seemed New: American Foreign Policy in the Age of George H.W. Bush

JEFFREY A. ENGEL teaches history and public policy at Texas A&M University, where he is the Verlin and Howard '52 Founders Professor and Director of Programming for the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs.  The author and editor of six books on American foreign policy, he is currently writing a history of American foreign relations in the age of George H.W. Bush.

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Wednesday, March 28.

Forum: Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan

DEL QUENTIN WILBER is an award winning reporter for the Washington Post.  He has spent most of his career covering law enforcement and sensitive security issues, and his work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Colloquium: Money Matters: Debt markets and growth politics in the modern United States

DAVID FREUND, Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Urban History Association, and the Urban Affairs Association.  His current projects include a history of financial markets and free market ideology in the 20^th century and The Modern American Metropolis: A Documentary Reader.  At Maryland he directs the Department’s Honors Program and teaches courses on metropolitan history, state building, and the political economy of capitalism and inequality in the modern U.S.  

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Wednesday, April 4.

Colloquium: Matthew Lassiter

MATTHEW D. LASSITER is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan.  He is the author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America series), winner of the 2007 Lillian Smith Award presented by the Southern Regional Council.  His article for the Journal of Urban History, “The Suburban Origins of ‘Color-Blind’ Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis,” was republished in The Best American History Essays 2006 (Palgrave).  He is also coeditor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 1998).  His current book project is The Suburban Crisis: The Pursuit and Defense of the American Dream.

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Wednesday, April 11.

Forum: Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance

J. HARVIE WILKINSON,  III was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit by Ronald Reagan. He has served on that court since 1984 and as its Chief Judge from 1996 to 2003. He has been frequently on the short list of prospects for the Supreme Court and is regarded as one of the nation's premier appellate jurists. He is also the author of "From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954-1978."

Colloquium: The Global Diffusion of Law: Transnational Crime and the Case of Human Trafficking

Please note that this colloquium will take place on a Monday.

BETH SIMMONS is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. Her book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years, 1924-1939 (Princeton University Press, 1994), was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 1995 as the best book published in 1994 in government, politics, or international relations. Her recent book, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009) received the APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Award, the International Social Science Council’s Stein Rokkan Prize, the American Society for International Law’s Certificate of Merit for a Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship, and the International Studies Association’s Best Book Award.

Simmons was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, was recently a Fellow at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University, and is the current President of the International Studies Association.

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Thursday, April 12.

Forum: Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad

BRUCE RIEDEL is senior fellow of Foreign Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.  A former CIA officer, Bruce Riedel focuses on political transition, terrorism and conflict resolution. He was a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues. At the request of President Obama he chaired an interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House that was completed in March 2009.  A book signing will follow his Forum.

Colloquium: The Case for Policy-Focused Political Analysis

PAUL PIERSON is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon and Schuster, 2010), co-authored by Jacob Hacker. Pierson is an active commentator on public affairs, whose writings have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. 

Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge University Press, 1994), won the American Political Science Association's 1995 prize for the best book on American national politics.  His article “Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics” won the APSA’s prize for the best article in the American Political Science Review in 2000, as well as the Aaron Wildavsky Prize for its enduring contribution to the field of public policy, awarded by the Public Policy Section of the APSA in 2011. He has served on the editorial boards of The American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and The Annual Review of Political Science. 

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Wednesday, April 25.

Colloquium: Kimberly Morgan

KIMBERLY J. MORGAN is associate professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University.  Her research focuses on the politics of social policy in the United States and Western Europe, with particular interests in family policies, health care, and taxation.  Morgan's book, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policy in Western Europe and the United States was published in 2006 by Stanford University Press, and her articles have appeared in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics & History, Social Politics, and World Politics.  Morgan received an Investigators' Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study Medicare reform, and recently completed, with Andrea Louise Campbell, The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of American Social Policy (Oxford University Press, 2011).  In 2006, she was elected to the National Academy of Social Insurance, and she serves as an associate editor of the journal Social Politics.

Morgan was a post-doctoral fellow at NYU's Institute of French Studies (2000-01) and a participant in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research program at Yale University (2001-03).   In 2008-09, she was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by Wednesday, May 2.