Description:

Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, will speak on Northwestern’s Evanston campus on October 2.
The event, hosted by the Contemporary Thought Speaker Series, the Global Engagement Summit,
and the department of political science, will be held in Ryan Auditorium at the Technological
Institute on Monday, October 2nd. The event will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will include a conversation
with Power moderated by Professor Wendy Pearlman followed by a Q&A with student questions.
Admission is free but tickets are required for the event and are available online through Eventbrite.
The event is open only to current Northwestern students, faculty and staff.
Power served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013-2017 under President Barack
Obama. Before that, she served on President Obama’s National Security Council and was a senior
adviser to then-Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. Power began her career as a war
correspondent for various publications before writing her first book, A Problem from Hell: America
and the Age of Genocide, which discussed America’s role responding to genocide and won the
Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. She now serves as a professor at both Harvard Law School and
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
“Ambassador Power's work in genocide prevention and human rights has inspired so many of us to
pursue socially-conscious paths,” said Mollie Leavitt, campus relations co-chair of GES. “We are
thrilled to have the chance to share her story with Northwestern’s campus.”
President Obama has called her “one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy” who has “showed
us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving
conflicts and defending human dignity.”
“Ambassador Power has been a powerful voice on every corner of foreign policy for almost two
decades, so we are so excited to hear from her during such a crucial and unique time in global
affairs,” said Ben Zimmermann, the chair of CTSS. “Her experience as a renowned academic,
award-winning author, and a top-level policymaker highlight her career as an interdisciplinary
thought-leader, the exact kind of speaker we look to bring to Northwestern.”
Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright has described Power as “a powerful friend to the
displaced and downtrodden and a foe of dictators and despots” as she has “never stopped defending
the values America holds dear.” Ambassador Power has been named one of TIME’s “100 Most
Influential People” in both 2004 and 2015 and one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers”
three times.
“The Political Science Department in Weinberg College is delighted to once again partner with
student groups to bring a speaker to campus who has a great deal to contribute to thoughtful
discourse about difficult issues in public affairs,” said Sara Monoson, chair of the department of
political science at Northwestern.
Wendy Pearlman, who will moderate the discussion, is an associate professor of political science at
Northwestern University, where she specializes in the comparative politics of the Middle East. She
is the author of three books, including We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria
(2017), which The New York Times Book Review described as “essential reading” and is based on
interviews from 2012 to the present with more than 300 displaced Syrians. She is also the author of
dozens of essays, academic articles, or book chapters and has studied or conducted research in
Spain, Germany, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
This discussion will be the Contemporary Thought Speaker Series’ first event of the year. Previous
CTSS speakers include writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barry
Jenkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Emily Nussbaum, acclaimed author Zadie Smith, Pulitzer
Prize-winning writer Junot Díaz, journalist Sarah Koenig, hip-hop artist Killer Mike, astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson and activist Angela Davis.
The Global Engagement Summit is a student-run organization that puts on a weeklong social
entrepreneurship summit every spring. In the 13 Summits held, over 500 delegates from 45
countries around the world have attended. In addition to planning the summit, GES brings globallyminded
programming to campus, engaging Northwestern students in nuanced conversations. This is
GES’s first campus-wide event of the year. In past years, GES has brought activists Deray
McKesson and Khalida Brohi to speak on campus, in addition to various socially-conscious career
panels for students.