Princeton University Podcasts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens discussed his stance on several hot-button issues, the personal rapport justices have with one another and what drew him to the legal profession in a well-attended public discussion at Princeton University with Provost Christopher Eisgruber, Monday, Oct. 10. At age 91, Stevens spoke fluently about the specifics of dozens of Supreme Court opinions, both recent and decades old, with Eisgruber, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, who served as a law clerk for Stevens from August 1989 to July 1990. Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010 after serving as a justice for 34 terms, having written 1,400 opinions, roughly half of them dissents. The event, titled "The Court, the Constitution and the Justice from Illinois: John Paul Stevens in Conversation with Provost Christopher Eisgruber," was held in a packed Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall. The Walter E. Edge Lecture and the John Marshall Harlan '20 Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication, it was presented by the Princeton University Public Lectures and the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA).