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   from the issue of March 24, 2005

     
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author on genocide at March 25 Thompson Forum

Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the subject of genocide, will speak on "U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights" on March 25 at 3:30 p.m. at the Lied Center for Performing Arts.


Samantha Power
 
Samantha Power

 
Power's talk is part of the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues. The talk is free and open to the public. A pre-forum talk by David Forsythe, university professor of political science, will begin at 3 p.m. in the Lied Center's Steinhart Room. The talk will be streamed live on the Web at www.unl.edu and carried live on KRNU radio (90.3 FM) and Channel 21 on Lincoln TimeWarner Cable.

The founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Power won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

A Problem From Hell is a scholarly analysis of America's policy toward genocide in the 20th century that asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide?

In the book, Power draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, to trace the United States' policy on genocide: the Turks' slaughter of the Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia, and the Hutus' genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Power moved to the United States from her native Ireland in 1979, and attended Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a journalist for U.S. News & World Report and The Economist, for whom she covered the war in Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996. In 1996 she joined the International Crisis Group as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia.

Her article on the Rwandan genocide, "Bystanders to Genocide" appeared in the September 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. She also edited, with Graham Allison, Realizing Human Rights. Power has just written a new introduction to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and has begun work on a book on the causes and consequences of "historical amnesia" in American foreign policy.

The Thompson series, a cooperative project of the Cooper Foundation, the Lied Center for Performing Arts and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has a mission of promoting better understanding of world events and issues to all Nebraskans. In 1990, the name of the series was changed in honor of E.N. "Jack" Thompson, a 1933 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who served as president of the Cooper Foundation from 1964 to 1990 and as its chairman from 1990 until his death in 2002.


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