March 23, 2006--Oberlin College will conclude its 2005-2006 Convocation series Tuesday, April 11, when award winning author Samantha Power discusses "Iraq's Collateral Damage."

Power teaches human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

She is the author of the acclaimed A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her scholarly analysis of America's policy towards genocide in the 20th century asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide?

Power has written a new introduction to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and begun work on a book on the causes and consequences of historical amnesia in American foreign policy. She is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact

From 1993 to 1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Economist. In 1996 she joined the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia.

Power was born in 1970 and immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, and lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

The Oberlin Convocation Series presents public discussions of cutting-edge issues by some of the country's most prominent thinkers under the auspices of the Finney Lecture Committee and the Office of the President.

The event is free and open to the public and will take place at 8 p.m. in Oberlin's Finney Chapel, located on the corner of West Lorain and North Professor streets. Free parking is available in nearby lots.