Princeton University Podcasts

Cyril Black International Book Forum, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies: The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations Discussants: Bernard Haykel, Near Eastern Studies Amaney Jamal, Politics Daniel Kurtzer, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs The Cyril Black International Book Forum is held in honor of the late Cyril Black, the emeritus James S. McDonnell Distinguished Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. Black was director of the Princeton’s Center of International Studies from 1968 to 1985 and a member of the University faculty for 50 years.

After decades of fighting for equality, civil rights leader and educator Bob Moses exhorted young people attending Princeton University's annual King Day celebration on Jan. 16 to remove segregation from a critical facet of public life where it still exists: education. Using Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as inspiration, Moses called on students to employ the U.S. Constitution to ensure educational equality for all Americans. "We need a constitutional amendment that says every child in this country is entitled to a quality public school education," said Moses, the 2011-12 distinguished fellow in Princeton's Center for African American Studies. This year's King Day event focused on the importance of education as a foundation for success throughout life. Speakers noted that widening economic gaps and other social disparities have led to failing public schools, high dropout rates and educational inequalities across the country. Forgoing the traditional keynote speech, Moses gave a civics lesson of sorts, turning Richardson Auditorium into his classroom and the audience of about 400 local schoolchildren, University community members and the public into his pupils. A New Perspective Jazz Band, a youth quartet from Ewing, N.J., also performed at the ceremony.

Cosponsored by the Office of Sustainability, and the Princeton Environmental Institute

Tom Brokaw, one of the most trusted and respected figures in broadcast journalism, is an author and special correspondent for NBC News. Hired by the network in 1966, he anchored the “TODAY” show and was the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” for 21 years. Appearing in more than 30 documentaries, Brokaw has reported on subjects ranging from race, AIDS, the war on terror, health care, Los Angeles gangs, Bill Gates, literacy, immigration and the evangelical movement. In addition, he collaborated with NBC's Peacock Productions for Discovery's Emmy-winning documentary "Global Warming: What You Need to Know with Tom Brokaw," and History Channel's two-hour documentaries, "1968 with Tom Brokaw" and "KING." He has received numerous honors and is credited with a series of journalistic “firsts,” including an exclusive U.S. one-on-one interview with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only anchor to report from the scene the night the Berlin Wall fell, and the first American anchor to travel to Tibet to report on human-rights abuses and to conduct an interview with the Dalai Lama. Brokaw also became a best-selling author with the book “The Greatest Generation” and later wrote "The Greatest Generation Speaks," "An Album of Memories," "A Long Way from Home" and "BOOM! Voices of the Sixties."

The President’s Lecture Series was established by President Shirley M. Tilghman in the fall of 2001 to give Princeton’s faculty an opportunity to learn about the work of their colleagues in other disciplines and to share their research with the University community. First proposed by Alan B. Krueger, the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1976, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor in Economics and Public Policy, the lectures are presented three times a year and are open to the public.

LAPA is pleased to welcome Michael Barr, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and key architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will discuss the origins of the financial crisis, and will assess the extent to which reforms help consumers, make the system safer, and end "too big to fail." Barr is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and at the Brookings Institution. He served from 2009-2010 as the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions. Barr was a key architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and played a central role in the Administration's housing finance policies. At Michigan, Barr teaches financial institutions and international financial regulation, among other courses. Barr conducts large-scale empirical research regarding financial services and writes about a wide range of issues in financial regulation. Recent books include "Insufficient Funds" and "Building Inclusive Financial Systems." Barr is a Contributor for CNBC and a frequent commentator on financial and housing issues. Barr previously served as Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin's Special Assistant, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, as Special Advisor to President William J. Clinton, as Special Advisor and Counselor on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, and as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Southern District of New York. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, an M. Phil in International Relations from Magdalen College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar, and his B.A., summa cum laude, with Honors in History, from Yale University. This event is cosponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School the Bendheim Center for Finance, and the Economics Department.

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the “Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 1000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, and the seeming escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide. Interviewees narrate and reflect upon their own personal histories as well, a dimension of the archive that now spans many decades and touches five continents. The momentum of our culture encourages very short memory and very quick judgment. We take our public discourse mostly in sound bites, and hence things that predate the latest news cycle are most often crowded out of our consideration. Historian’s Eye asks you to slow down; to look and to listen; to pay close attention and to notice; to entertain a variety of perspectives; to ask varied questions; to think about the current moment as possessing a deep history, and also to think of it as itself historical—futurity’s history. Above all, Historian’s Eye asks you to pitch in and to talk back. Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1992, and is the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2006); What Have They Built You to Do? THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History, and a multimedia documentary project devoted to the Obama presidency and political life in contemporary America. His teaching interests are clustered under the general rubric of race in U.S. political culture, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.

The Program in Law and Public Affairs invites you to join us Wednesday, November 16 at 4:30 p.m., Lewis Library 120, for a Book Forum on The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi's Italy(Princeton University Press 2011) by Maurizio Viroli. Professor Viroli will be joined by a panel of distinguished scholars to talk about the book, and discussion of the developing events in Italy.

McKay Jenkins *96, Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English and Director of Journalism, University of Delaware, will discuss his bestselling new book on the growing presence of synthetic chemicals in our bodies and environment: What's Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World (Random House, 2011). Joining him as interlocutor will be Richard Preston *83, bestselling author of The Hot Zone. In addition to their discussion of environmental toxins, Jenkins and Preston will reflect on the process and challenge of nonfiction science and environmental writing.

Cosponsored by the J. Edward Farnum Lecture Fund, the Center for Jewish Life, and the Departments of English and Comparative Literature Jonathan Safran Foer, a 1999 graduate of Princeton, is the author of the novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). In 2009, he published a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals. He is working on a version of the Haggadah, which will be released in March 2012. His talk, a conversation with novelist and creative writing professor Joyce Carol Oates, will focus on the profession of writing, as well as the role of autobiographical elements and issues of Jewish identity that appear in Foer’s work.