Announcements of lectures

Alexander Stubb — Finnish politician, Prime Minister of Finland (2014-2015), director and professor of the School of Transnational Management of the European University Institute. Stubb is a long-term practitioner of European politics and academic researcher on European integration.

Date: June 7, 2022

Fiona Hill is an Anglo-American political scientist. Doctor of Philosophy (1998). Expert of the Brookings Institution. In 2014, Le Figaro called her a “recognized American expert on Russia.” In April 2017 she was appointed by US President Donald Trump as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council.

Date: April 28, 2022

Andrew George McCabe is an American attorney who served as the Deputy Director of the FBI (2016-2018). McCabe has been a contributor at CNN since 2019. He obtained a J.D. degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1993. In August 2020, George Mason University announced McCabe would be joining the faculty of the Schar School of Policy and Government as Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Topic: “National security and political decision making”

Date: April 6, 2022

David Howell Petraeus –  is a retired United States Army general and public official. He served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from September 6, 2011, until his resignation on November 9, 2012. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus served 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and commander, U.S. Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th commander, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from October 13, 2008, to June 30, 2010, and as commanding general, Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) from February 10, 2007, to September 16, 2008.As commander of MNF-I, Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq.

Date: March 7, 2022

Michael A. McFaul – Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

Date: March 5, 2022

Andres Rodriguez-Posse is Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The science that Andres deals with, studies the patterns and factors of the formation of the territorial structure of different countries and regions. 

Andres is a regular consultant to several international institutions, such as the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the Cities Alliance, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization. .Among his honors is the 2018 ERSA Prize in Regional Science, considered to be among the highest awards in regional science.

Topic: The revenge of the places that don’t matter and the rise of a dangerous world

Date: May 26, 2022, 19:00 Kyiv time

Paul Krugman is the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory in 2008. He has taught at Yale, M.I.T. and Stanford. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He also joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. 

Date: March 14, 2022

Mark Esposito is recognized internationally as a top global thought leader in matters relating to The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the changes and opportunities that technology will bring to a variety of industries. He is Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Nexus FrontierTech, an AI scale up firm, dedicated to help businesses become more efficient and competitive by introducing the latest data management science. He was inducted in 2016 in the radar of Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent rising business thinkers in the world.He is a global expert of the World Economic Forum and advisor to national governments.

Date: March 8, 2022

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the leading international intellectual, the author of bestselling books “The Black Swan” and “Skin in the game”. He is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematician, and author. The Sunday Times called his 2007 book “The Black Swan” one of the 12 most influential books since World War II. His lecture is dedicated to the concept of antifragility and its practical applications.

Date: March 3, 2022

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is Historian of the Soviet Union, Central Asia, Russia and East Germany (GDR), Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow, writer. She received a master’s degree in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia at Harvard University. Her research interests cover Soviet nationality policy, race and ethnicity in the USSR and GDR, race and racism in the former Soviet Union, African-American experience in the USSR and Russia, Soviet Subjectivity, Old Believers in the Russian Empire.

She is also a book review editor for H-Ukraine (an H-Net Network), which promotes scholarly and intellectual discussion of Ukrainian studies and history. This network strives to make available recent scholarships, teaching resources, and other material related to the academic study of Ukraine.

Topic: Black Skin in the Red Land

Date: June 2, 2022

David Mazzuca is a Hitachi International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently in residence at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University. Formerly, he served as an instructor at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia Climate School, Columbia University. From 2015 to 2019, he was the Assistant Director for Housing Recovery with the Sandy Recovery Division, State of New Jersey. In that role, he was responsible for administering the delivery of New Jersey’s post-Sandy US$1.4 billion housing restoration grant program portfolio. 

Jorge Ramirez served as the Director of the Disaster Recovery and Coastal Program at the Texas General Land Office from 2011 to 2015.  He oversaw more than US$3.2 billion in funding for infrastructure, housing, and economic development projects across 63 counties. During his tenure, the Texas Disaster Recovery Program flourished into an innovative, nationwide model for long-term disaster recovery.  Mr. Ramirez is currently working in Puerto Rico to help the state recover from hurricanes Irma and Maria. 

Topic: Disaster Management: Understanding Post-disaster rebuilding operations

Date: May 31, 2022

Slavoj Žižek is a leading Slovenian philosopher and culturologist, one of the world’s Top 25 Global Thinkers according to Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (USA). Slavoj Žižek is a representative of the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis. He used the theories of the eminent French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to reread modern ideology and pop culture. His research interests include classical German philosophy, pop culture, neo-imperialism, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, multiculturalism and Alfred Hitchcock.

Topic: What is freedom today?

Date: May 24, 2022

Amir Weiner is an American historian and associate professor of Soviet history at Stanford University. His interests include mass violence, population politics, totalitarianism, and World War II. Weiner is the director of Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford, and his research includes the KGB and the Soviet Union’s surveillance state. He is the author of Making Sense of War, Landscaping the Human Garde, and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War II on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book At Home with the KGB: A New History of the Soviet Security Service, will be published by Yale University Press in 2023. 

Topic: At Home with the KGB: A New History of the Soviet Security Service

Date: May 17, 2022

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. Snyder’s work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought.

Topic: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Date: May 10, 2022

Philip George Zimbardo is an American psychologist and honorary professor at Stanford University. His 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment is world-renowned for studying the impact of situational variables on participants’ reactions and behavior in a two-week prison environment simulation. He is the author of various introductory textbooks in psychology for college students and other well-known works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Paradox of Time, and The Treatment of Time. He is also the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project, an organization dedicated to enhancing heroic behavior among ordinary people.

Date: May 5, 2022

Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies, where he was Convener of the “European Forum”. He has served as Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian and East European Studies (1989-95), Chair of its History Department (1995-1998), member of the Faculty Senate and its Steering Committee (2001-4), and Director of Stanford’s interdisciplinary programs in International Relations and International Policy Studies. He presently serves as the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program.

Topic: “War crimes and genocied in history and today”

Date: May 3, 2022

Anne Applebaum — Polish-American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about Marxism–Leninism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. During the public talk Anne will discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for her book “Gulag: A History”. In October 2017, she published the history book “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine”, a history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize for the second time, making her the only author to ever win the award twice. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Date: April 21, 2022

Ann Laura Stoler (born 1949) is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She has made significant contributions to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, historical anthropology, feminist theory, and affect. She is particularly known for her writings on race in the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Topic: “Interior frontiers”

Date: April 8, 2022

Kate Brown is the author of several prize-winning histories, including «Plutopia: Nuclear Families», «Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters» (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, «Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future» (Norton 2019), translated into nine languages, won the silver medal for the Laura Shannon Prize, and the Reginald Zelnik and Marshall D. Shulman Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Olha Martynyuk is also scholar-at-risk fellow at University of Basel, Switzerland.
She defended her dissertation on the history of Russian Nationalism in early XX century Ukraine. She assisted professor Kate Brown on her project «Manual for Survival: Chornobyl’s Guide to the Future» and translated the book into Ukrainian.

Topic: “New nuclear security”

Date: March 31, 2022

Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary, a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, and founder and director of the International Justice Lab. Her research engages questions in human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts, and has been published in journals including International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Human Rights. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post, among others.  

Title: Justice for Ukraine: Challenges and Opportunities”

Date: March 28, 2022

Mary Sarotte Mary Elise Sarotte is the distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at John Hopkins University. She is also a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Sarotte earned her AB in History and Science at Harvard and her PhD in History at Yale University.

Date: March 24, 2022

Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the founding director of the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies there, and its former Dean. He is also the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the 2021 recipient of the SAIS Founders’ Award for lifetime service to the school and has twice won the SAIS Excellence in Teaching Award. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009.

Title: The Strategy That Can Defeat Putin

Date: March 18, 2022

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context; Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. He writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and other topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

Title: The Foundations of Propagandistic Speech 

Date: March 17, 2022

Thomas Rid – Professor of Strategic Studies and Founding Director of Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Most recent book is Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrae, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Date: March 16, 2022

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of many books, including The Dictator’s Handbook, co-authored with Alastair Smith, and the forthcoming book The Invention of Power (January 2022).

Date: March 15, 2022

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and his research is regularly featured in the popular media, including outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Economist, NPR, the Washington Post and Time Magazine as well as TV, including BBC Newsnight, BBC World, the Today Show, CBS Inside Edition, and NBC Nightly News.

Date: March 11, 2022

Nicolas Cristakis – is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, sociologist and physician. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and in 2010, he was listed by Foreign Policy magazine in their annual list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.
His KSE public talk will be based on the book «Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society» in which the author explores the idea that evolution has given humans a suite of beneficial capacities, including love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Nicholas will talk about practical application of his findings.is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, sociologist and physician. In 2009, Christakis was named by TIME magazine to their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and in 2010, he was listed by Foreign Policy magazine in their annual list of Top 100 Global Thinkers.

Date: March 9, 2022