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OBERLIN COLLEGE PRESENTS 2003-2004 CONVOCATION SERIES
AUGUST 21, 2003--Jonathan Schell, the eloquent antiwar essayist best known for The Fate of the Earth, will open Oberlin College’s annual Convocation Series at 8 p.m. Tuesday, September 2 in Finney Chapel. His address, titled "The American Empire in the Second Nuclear Age," will mark the opening of Oberlin's 171st academic year.
The Oberlin Convocation Series presents free, public discussions of cutting-edge issues by some of the country's most prominent thinkers. This year's speakers also include Aaron Miller, Arab-Israeli expert and Seeds of Peace president, on October 2; Patricia J. Williams, legal scholar and "the iconoclastic commentator on race" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), on February 9; and Billy Collins, the best-selling, critically acclaimed U.S. poet laureate, on March 7.
Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is teaching a course this year on the nuclear dilemma at Yale Law School and is a fellow at Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization. He speaks and writes often on nuclear issues and is frequently consulted by members of Congress and the media. He appears regularly on radio and television programs, including the Lehrer News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show, and Hardball with Chris Matthews.
Hailed by The New York Times in 1982 as "an event of profound historical moment," The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times book prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. The book first appeared in three parts in The New Yorker, where Schell was a staff writer from 1967 until 1987 and the principle writer of the magazine’s Notes and Comments.
His recent articles on the nuclear question include essays in The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and Harper's Magazine, where he is a contributing editor. Schell has been the peace and disarmament correspondent for The Nation since 1998. His most recent book is the just-released The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
All Oberlin Convocation events take place in Finney Chapel, located on the corner of North Professor and West Lorain streets. The series is presented under the auspices of Oberlin's Finney Lecture Committee with support from the Office of the President of Oberlin College.
2003-2004 Oberlin Convocation Speakers
Jonathan
Schell
From 1990 until 1996, Schell was a columnist at Newsday
and New York Newsday. He has taught at Emory University, New York
University, Princeton University, and Wesleyan University, where he was
a distinguished visiting writer from 1997 to 2002. In 1987, he was a fellow
at the Institute of Politics and, in 2002, a fellow at the Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University. The author of more than 10
books, Schell received the Lannan Award for literary nonfiction in 1999.
Aaron
Miller
Aaron
Miller is president of Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit group founded after
the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to foster understanding between
Israeli and Palestinian youths. During the last two decades, he
served as an adviser to six secretaries of state at the Department of
State, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the
Arab-Israeli peace process. He has written three books on the Middle East
and lectured widely at universities and Middle East symposia across the
country. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
Patricia
J. Williams
Patricia
J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School;
a columnist on legal, gender, and racial issues for The Nation;
and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her provocative work on
U.S. race relations and her innovative interdisciplinary approach to writing.
Among her numerous writings are the acclaimed books The Alchemy of
Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (1991) and Seeing a
Color-blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1998).
Billy
Collins
A professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of
New York, Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-03. His
work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The
American Scholar, and his last three collections of poems have broken
sales records for poetry. He is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public
Library "Literary Lion." He has published seven collections
of poetry, including the recent anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back
to Poetry.
Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli
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