Thinking about law school? Join Professor Ari Gabinet of Brown University for an in-depth discussion on the law school admissions process. With extensive experience advising students on their law school applications and academic careers, Professor Gabinet will share strategies for crafting a compelling application, insights into what admissions committees look for, and advice on how to stand out in a competitive field.

This session will also cover trends in legal education, the role of personal statements, and how to leverage extracurricular experiences to strengthen your application. Whether you’re applying soon or just considering your options, this lunch will provide valuable guidance for anyone interested in pursuing a legal career.

In the New Space Era, China has the most ambitious space program in addition to the United States. As the two major powers in international space exploration, the efforts of China and the US have significantly shaped our knowledge of space and its utilization. Living in the same space, China and the US are sharing the same exploration targets and scientific goals. However, their cooperation is limited in the space domain and conflict may occasionally occur. This talk will introduce China’s human and robotic space program, compare it to that of the US, and place a special focus on the future relationship of China and the US in space.

Dr. Yuqi Qian is a Research Assistant Professor from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He holds a doctoral degree in Planetary Geology and Comparative Planetology from the China University of Geosciences in 2022 and was a visiting Graduate Student at Brown during 2019-2021. Dr. Qian has dedicated his studies to unravel the geological processes of the Moon behind modern remote sensing approaches and returned lunar samples, with a special focus on China’s Lunar Exploration Program. He has deeply involved in the China’s first lunar sample return mission, Chang’e-5, and the world’s first farside sample return mission, Chang’e-6, as well as Chang’e-7 and 8 to the lunar South Pole. Dr. Qian has published more than 40 papers with more than 1000 citations, contributing to construct the geological history of Procellarum KREEP Terrane and South Pole Aitken basin based on results of China’s lunar program. Dr. Qian is a member of the science and application committee of the China’s first crewed lunar mission, and is helping to send humans back to the Moon before 2030.

Join the photographer Robert Nickelsberg for a talk on the photography exhibit “Legacy of Lies”

Artist Statement:

The photographs by Robert Nickelsberg offer a visual historical record of the first years of the civil war in El Salvador that is significant in the range and depth of its coverage of the conflict and illuminating in its critical view of the United States’ involvement, which was an important test of Cold War counterinsurgency strategy after the Vietnam war. The images of the violence and death form the foundational period that forced many Salvadorans to flee north to the U.S. creating the chaos and political gridlock along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Reception and book signing to follow.  

Exhibit open February 19 to May 30, 2025

2nd Floor, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

REGISTER HERE

Join the Watson Institute for a conversation with Van Jones, moderated by Wendy J. Schiller, Howard R. Swearer Interim Director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, and Alison S. Ressler Professor of Political Science. 

Van Jones
CNN Host, Founder of DreamMachine.org and Author of the Van Jones Substack

Van Jones is a U.S. media personality, entrepreneur and world-class changemaker. Jones has a rare track record of bringing people together to do hard things – in areas as diverse as clean energy solutions, criminal justice reform and racial inclusion in the tech sector. In 2007, Van was the primary champion of the Green Jobs Act, signed into law by George W. Bush. In 2009, he worked in the Obama White House as the Special Advisor for Green Jobs. In 2018, he helped pass the FIRST STEP Act, signed into law by Donald Trump; the New York Times calls that legislation the most substantial breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation.

In 2021, Jones was the first recipient of Jeff Bezos’ Courage & Civility Award. He has since founded Dream Machine Innovation Lab and launched RAPPORT.co, which uses A.I. to increase firms’ EQ. A Yale Law School graduate, Van is a CNN host, an Emmy Award-winning producer, a 3X New York Times best-selling author and the creator of the Van Jones Substack.

Arvind Rajagopal is a Professor of Media Studies at NYU, affiliated with Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis. His work explores comparative media, media theory, and postcolonial states. He is the author of Politics After Television and The Indian Public Sphere, among others, and has received awards from the MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations. He has also been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, DC).

*Lunch served*

The rise of an industry tasked with the collection of medical debts in the United States is a relatively recent development. Physicians and hospitals have long held themselves apart from profit maximization and have expressed a moral aversion to immiserating patients in the pursuit of unpaid debts. This is particularly true of nonprofit hospitals, which find their origins in almshouses, community associations and religious orders. In addition, while creditors have tremendous powers at their disposal in seeking to collect, including lawsuits, wage garnishment, and property liens, medical providers recoup relatively little even when they resort to such aggressive measures.

Why, then, in the last forty years, have US nonprofit hospitals increasingly turned to third-party debt collection, debt sales, and lawsuits against patient debtors? Answering this question demands an investigation of shifts in health insurance, hospital finance, and the moral economy of care. It also requires an understanding of physicians’ progressive disengagement from debt collection. What was once an unavoidably personal negotiation has become an administrative and legal process divorced from clinical obligations. This talk draws on historical research and new data to explain how unremunerative practices causing financial harm to patients became standard practice.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luke Messac is a physician and historian at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his residency training in emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital.

Dr. Messac’s early research was on the history and political economy of health care in Africa. His first book, No More to Spend (Oxford University Press, 2020) was a history of the practice of medicine under regimes of austerity in British colonial Africa. He has also published widely in medical and historical journals on a range of subjects including the development of national income accounting, the origins of trade regulations for medicinal opiates, and determinants of population-level mortality rates. His most recent work focuses on the rise of the medical debt collection industry in the United States. This is the subject of his book Your Money or Your Life (Oxford University Press, 2023). His has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs and has testified before the United States Senate. He lives with his wife and two children in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

The Office of University Postdoctoral Affairs (OUPA) at Brown University is pleased to announce the second annual postdoctoral research symposium on Thursday, March 27, 2025 in the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center and Sayles Hall.

This symposium will feature the innovative research being conducted by postdoctoral scholars at Brown and include the following:

• A professional development workshop for postdoctoral scholars
• The Postdoctoral Excellence Awards ceremony in Sayles Hall
  
• A poster session accompanied by a reception in Sayles Hall

While this symposium is designed for postdoctoral research associates and postdoctoral fellows with primary appointments at Brown as well as equivalent postdoctoral appointees with a Brown affiliation at a Brown-affiliated hospital, OUPA is extending the invitation to attend this event to members of the Brown community who could benefit from attending and networking with colleagues.

A submission form for the poster session was shared with the postdoctoral community in December 2024, and a registration form for the workshop will be shared in January 2025 following the Winter Break.

About the Event
In August 2024, a mural reading “Palestina Livre: do Rio ao Mar” (Free Palestine, from the river to the sea) appeared at a major São Paulo intersection, igniting controversy amid the Israel-Gaza war. While critics condemned it as antisemitic, supporters framed it as solidarity with the Palestinian people. This incident highlighted Brazil’s deep entanglement with the Israel-Palestine conflict—an engagement that traces back not to May 1948 or October 7, 2023, but to a pivotal moment in 1979.

In this talk Elmaleh determines and revisits 1979 as the year zero of this ongoing discourse in Brazil, with the arrival of Dr. Farid Sawan, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to Brazil, and his demand to establish an official diplomatic office. Rapidly emerging as a flashpoint, a seemingly technical request turned what had once been a mostly distant geopolitical issue into a pressing domestic debate, sparking media polarization, diplomatic maneuvering and political divisions. Using theoretical framing of soft power and public diplomacy, this study explores how non-state and state actors shaped public opinion, revealing a critical episode in the intersection of transnational politics and diaspora activism under the Cold War ideological climate. More broadly, it triggers broader discussions on oil geopolitics, global power dynamics, and Brazil’s role within the evolving Global South.

About the Speaker 
Omri Elmaleh is a visiting assistant professor in Israel Studies at the Judaic Studies Program. He is a historian specializing in Latin America with deep expertise in Middle Eastern diasporas across the regions. His research examines the dynamic movements of people, goods, ideas and even animals between the Luso-Hispanic and Arab-Muslim worlds, uncovering overlooked connections that have shaped both geographies. By bridging Latin American and Middle Eastern studies, his work offers a transregional perspective on migration, identity, trade networks, international relations and cultural exchange.

About the Event

The event will begin with a screening of the award-winning “Bring Them Home” documentary, which will last around thirty minutes. Then, Andrew and Rob will participate in a moderated panel discussion on the film and the deported veteran movement. Finally, audience members will have the opportunity to ask questions.

About the Documentary

“Bring Them Home” is a powerful award-winning documentary exploring the harrowing issue of deported veterans—a group who has honorably served yet finds themselves exiled by the very nation they defended. This gripping film reveals the harsh realities of non-citizen soldiers who confront the threat of deportation due to shifting immigration laws, intertwining personal sacrifice with national identity. Through intimate portraits, “Bring Them Home” spotlights the emotional and psychological battles these veterans face post-service—mental health struggles and moral injury—while they wage a larger fight for justice and re-entry into the U.S. It’s a stark examination of policy versus human cost, of citizenship entangled with service. Helmed by Tamara Jay and Rike Boomgaarden, Executive produced by Andrei Drei “Drei” Rosca, and Elaine Carmody and produced by Rob Young Walker, with Excuse My Accent and Dream Roots Creative, the documentary is a critical look at patriotism’s fine print, questioning who gets to call America home.

About the Panelists

Andrew Steinberg is an experienced grassroots organizer and researcher passionate about combining law, policy, and community organizing to create transformative change. He graduated magna cum laude with honors from Brown University, where his studies focused on the history of deported veterans and their advocacy. He is active in the deported veteran movement and served on the board of the Deported Veterans Support House, a shelter and community resource center for exiled ex-servicemembers in Tijuana, Mexico. He is currently completing a concurrent Juris Doctor degree at Georgetown Law and a Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Rob Young is an award-winning filmmaker, music artist, social entrepreneur, and humanitarian. As the founder of Excuse My Accent and CEO of Rob Young Productions, he focuses on creating platforms that invoke change through music, events, and film while uplifting inner cultural non-profit initiatives.

Through his commitment to spreading awareness of social issues, Rob has been a formative speaker on DE&I and a creative visionary. His work ranges from an award-winning film about deported veterans, “Bring Them Home,” which was shown at the United States Capitol building, leading over 50 legislators to sign on to the Veteran Service Recognition Act. This marquee event was in partnership with prominent non-profits ImmDef, ACLU, and LULAC. This impactful documentary short spawned from his hit record “Excuse My Accent,” further showing his ability to utilize creativity in all facets to uplift impactful conversations. Rob is also a creative visionary working with many organizations, including the National Alliance of Mental Illness, the Washington State Department of Equity, the first ever in United States government history, and more.

About the Event

Carla Yumatle presents a new definition of populism based on the “creation of a new social actor,” as its necessary condition. This approach to populism has two implications. First, it shows that today’s democratic discontent could not be properly understood through the lenses of populism. Second, it suggests that populism, thus defined, was possible under certain structural historical social conditions that today have been eroded.

About the Speaker:

Carla Yumatle is currently the R.F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard University, and was the Fortabat Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University in the Fall 2024. She teaches political theory at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina). She earned her PhD in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley, a Masters from London School of Economics, and her postdoctoral research at Brown University in the Political Theory Project. She published on liberalism, pluralism and human rights. She co-edited El mundo visto desde América Latina (2024) and La sociedad civil en América Latina: transformaciones y rupturas recientes(forthcoming, October 2025). She is currently working on various projects such as the erosion of democracy; populism; an analysis of the ideal of democracy in the first transitional government in Argentina; and the new conceptions of human rights held by different actors in civil society in Latin America.

About the Series:

Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis.

All are welcome.

From its inception, Israel has defined itself as both Jewish and democratic—a dual identity that has shaped the nation’s history and continues to generate deep tensions. Over the past two years, the most turbulent since the state’s founding, these tensions have intensified, deepening political, social, and religious divisions. This lecture will explore the key challenges facing Israel’s democratic institutions, social fabric, and future as a shared society.

Masua Sagiv is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and Senior Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Sagiv’s scholarly work focuses on contemporary Judaism in Israel as a culture, a religion, and a nationality, as well as being part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors, and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood. Her book, Radical Conservatism (in Hebrew), on the halakhic feminist struggle in Israel, was published by Carmel Publishing House in 2024.

At the 6th Brown-MIT Doctoral Development Workshop doctoral students interested in development will present their work-in-progress to familiar and new audiences. The workshop is co-organized by the Graduate Program in Development (GPD) at Brown University and the International Development Group (IDG) in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT.

Brown-MIT Doctoral Development Workshop
Graduate Program in Development (Watson Institute at Brown)&
The International Development Group (DUSP-MIT)

This years’ conference will be held on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Friday April 4, 2025

Please note that morning sessions will be held in room 9-415. Lunch and afternoon sessions will be held in room 9-217

10:30-10:40

Welcome, introductions and workshop framing

Patrick Heller (Brown) and Jason Jackson (MIT)

10:40-12:30 Session 1

“Urban Adaptation Financing for Rapidly Growing Amazonian Cities” Mrinalini Penumaka (MIT) and Sylvia Jiménez Riofríoa (MIT)

Discussant: Maria Arievitch (Brown)

“Public Goods with Corporate Sponsors” Sai Pitre (Brown)

Discussant: Benjamin Muñoz Rojas(MIT)

11:30-11:40 mini-break

“China’s High-tech, Low-road trap” JS Tan (MIT)

Discussant: Yitong Liu (Brown)

“The Fiscal and Financial Roots of Unfinished Residential Construction: Evidence from China and India” Aidon Li

Discussant: Chenab Navalkha (MIT)

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:20 - Session 2

“The Multispecies Caste Economy, Violence, and Autonomy along Chittagong’s Karnafuli River” Annabelle Suitor Tan (Brown)

Discussant: Mrinalini Penumaka (MIT)

“Resistance in Women’s Work: A View from the Indian Platform Economy” Amrita Nair (MIT)

Discussant: Yulin Yang (Brown)

2:20-2:30 mini-break

“Solar Demand of Small Firms: Evidence from Kenya” Jiayue Zhang (Brown)

Discussant: TBD (MIT)

“Punishment Before Guilt: Media, Punitiveness, and the Rise of Pretrial Detention” Benjamin Muñoz Rojas(MIT)

Discussant: Jiayue Zhang (Brown)

3:20-3:45 Coffee Break

3:45-5:00 Session 3

“On God, investors, and copper: A dispute for the origin of the value of nature”” Diego Alonso (MIT)

Discussant: Aidon Li (Brown)

“Central Banking in Growth Models in the Global South”

Sanghyun Cho and Soeun Kim (Brown)

Discussant: JS Tan (MIT)

“Globalization in an increasingly borderized world” Adeposi Adeogun (MIT)

Discussant: Annabelle Suitor (Brown)

*Lunch provided*

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, non-elected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah Downey is a junior research scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge where she works on democratic theory and macroeconomic policymaking. Downey holds B.A.s in Mathematics and Economics from UNC Chapel Hill, an MSc in Economics & Philosophy from the LSE, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. Her research considers the democratic implications of how states make policy. As such, she has written on topics including the administrative state, monetary policy, macrofinance and the green transition, and the meaning of security in politics and economics.

Join us for a compelling discussion with David Wade, Founder and Managing Director of Greenlight Strategies, LLC. Wade served as Chief of Staff to Senator John Kerry, both during his time in the Senate and when he became Secretary of State. He also served as National Press Secretary for Vice President Joe Biden during the 2012 Obama campaign.

In this session, Wade will share insights from his distinguished career in public service, discussing the intricacies of working in the Senate, managing the communications strategy for a presidential campaign, and navigating the challenges of global diplomacy. He’ll provide a behind-the-scenes look at the intersection of politics, press, and policy, and offer valuable lessons for those interested in strategic communications and political leadership.

Please join the Center for Language Studies and the Center for Middle East Studies for: “A Conversation on Türkiye’s Past and Future: A Discussion with Garo Paylan and Hosted by Stephen Kinzer”.

This special discussion brings together a respected former member of parliament, Garo Paylan, as a guest speaker and a Türkiye expert, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute, author, and journalist Stephen Kinzer, as a host for a thoughtful conversation about the historical and contemporary challenges faced by minority communities in Türkiye.

Together, they will talk about governmental policies and minorities from the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire to modern-day Türkiye, providing context for understanding current issues and developments.

This event is being sponsored by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund. 

AI for Impact and Justice

A special roundtable event

This roundtable will convene leading voices from NGOs, foundations, academia, and tech companies to critically examine the potential of AI for human rights and humanitarian work.

Event Schedule

2:00 - 3:00 PM | NGOs Bending the Arc of AI towards Impact and Justice

• Sarah Spencer, EthicAI
• Megan McGuire, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders

3:00 - 3:30 PM | Coffee Break 

Tea, coffee, and light snacks will be provided.

3:30 - 4:00 PM | Fireside chat with Devshi Mehrotra, Founder and CEO of Justice Text

Join Malika Saada Saar as she speaks with Devshi Mehrotra, the Founder and CEO of Justice Text, an AI-powered body cam analysis tool that allows attorneys to search the text and match it with the video.

4:00 - 5:00 PM | Foundations and Corporations: the Commitment to AI for Impact

• Margo Drakos, DRK Foundation 
• Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw

5:00 - 6:00 PM | Reception

Light refreshments will be provided.

The Taubman Center is honored to present the Noah Krieger ’93 Memorial Lecture featuring Justice Stephen Breyer, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Breyer will share insights from his distinguished career and discuss the themes of constitutional interpretation and democracy explored in Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism. 

This event offers a rare opportunity to hear from one of the most influential legal minds of our time, reflecting on the role of the judiciary, the evolving meaning of the Constitution, and its impact on contemporary governance.

The conversation will be moderated by Justin Driver, Brown alumnus and Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Middle East Colloquium

About the Event
This talk examines the relationship between the concepts of “transcription” and “transition” in the development of Jean Sénac’s poetics, paying close attention to his engagements with Algerian būqāla poetry,a genre of oral texts recited by women in Algerian Arabic. As a Francophone pied-noir intellectual committed to Algerian independence, Sénac understood French as a “transitional language” to be employed only while a new Arabophone literary class could emerge. Driven by his exploration of būqāla poetry, Sénac thus abstracted transcription, an ethnographic practice with considerable colonial roots in Algeria, into a translational paradigm that allowed him to maintain his authority as a Francophone Algerian poet––an authority whose ultimate purpose was to negate itself. An analysis of key poems written and translated between the early 50s and late 60s allows us to observe how transcription became a conceptual paradigm through which Sénac reconfigured his relationship to the “voice of the people,” and his status as an anticolonial and Third-Worldist poet.

About the Speaker
Maru Pabón is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University with a certificate of concentration in Middle East Studies. Her current book project examines efforts to construct the “voice of the people” across Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian Third-Worldist poetry. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume “Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America,” forthcoming with Brill in Spring 2025. Her writing and research has appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, Bidoun, Momus, and Bidayat.

John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford. 

Professor McWhorter is an author of more than twenty books including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. In 2016 he published Words on the Move: Why English Won’t - and Can’t - Sit Still (Like, Literally), while in 2021 he published Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism. He also writes a weekly column for The New York Times and hosts the language podcast Lexicon Valley. 

Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, is an academic economist who has made scholarly contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resource economics. He is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual, having published over 200 articles in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad on the issues of racial inequality and social policy. A Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past Vice President of the American Economics Association, Prof. Loury has been a visiting scholar at Oxford, Tel Aviv University, the University of Stockholm, the Delhi School of Economics, the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic magazine.

Join us for a conversation with Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who will discuss his book Righting Wrongs with Ieva Jusionyte.

Audience Q & A will follow the talk.

Lunch provided.

Presenting the fourth William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture:

How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from inter-regional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.

Q & A to follow moderated by Mark Blyth, Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

*lunch served*

Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China’s renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar’s value to the point of irrelevancy.

Contra the doomsayers, Paul Blustein shows that the dollar’s standing atop the world’s currency pyramid is impregnable, barring catastrophic policy missteps by the US government. Recounting how the United States has wielded the dollar to impose devastating sanctions against adversaries, Blustein explains that although targets such as Russia have found ways to limit the damage, Washington’s financial weaponry will retain potency long into the future. His message, however, is that America must not be complacent about the dollar; the great power that its supremacy confers comes with commensurate responsibility.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Blustein has written about economic issues for more than 40 years, first as a reporter at leading news organizations and later as the author of several critically acclaimed books. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, Paul spent much of his career reporting for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Kamakura, Japan.