Lincoln Journal Star (Nebraska)
March 25, 2005 Friday
City Edition
Lecture at Lied on U.S. foreign policy
Lincoln, NE
Pulitzer-winner Power to speak at Thompson Forum.
Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the subject of
genocide, will speak on “U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights” at
3:30 p.m. today at the Lied Center for Performing Arts.
Power’s talk is part of the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues. It
is free and open to the public.
A pre-forum talk will be at 3 p.m. in the Lied Center’s Steinhart
Room. The talk will be streamed live on the Web at and
carried live on KRNU radio at 90.3 FM and on Channel 21 on Lincoln
Time Warner Cable.
Power is the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human
Rights Policy and adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University. She won the 2003 Pulitzer
Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle
Award for “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”
The book is a scholarly analysis of the U.S. policy toward genocide
in the 20th century that asks: Why do American leaders who vow “never
again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide?
In the book, Power traces the United States’ policy on genocide: the
Turks’ slaughter of Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia,
Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia,
and the Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Power was a journalist for U.S. News & World Report and The
Economist, for whom she covered the war in Yugoslavia from 1993 to
1996. In 1996, she joined the International Crisis Group as a
political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia.
She has begun work on a book on the causes and consequences of
“historical amnesia” in U.S. foreign policy.