Speaker Series

BCICS organizes public talk series and brings prominent speakers to campus to stimulate dialog within the Northwestern community on important, often overlooked, international issues. Please see the BCICS calendar for details about upcoming events.

Current Events: SPECIAL LECTURES

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Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Stiglitz on The Three Trillion Dollar War BCICS is pleased to announce that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz will be speaking on campus about his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. The event, co-sponsored by the Kellogg School of Management, will be held Friday, April 18th in the Tribune Audi­torium at the Allen Center starting at 9:00 am. Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000.             Dr. Stiglitz is the author of numerous books on economics and international trade, including the bestsell­ing Globalization and Its Discontents. In his newest book Stiglitz and Harvard co-author Linda J. Bilmes explore the hidden costs of the Iraq war, including the accelerated depreciation of our nation’s military equipment, health care and disability compensation for returning veterans, and the negative effects of the war on the U.S. and global economies. Please join us for what is sure to be a provocative and sobering account of the true financial and human costs of the Iraq war. This event is free and open to the public. For more details please contact us at BCICS at 847-467-2770.

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BCICS presents:
Torture in the Era of Democracy

Following the success and well-deserved attention enjoyed by the Torture in the Era of Democracy speaker series, BCICS will host another timely event on the tenth
anniversary
of the opening of Tamms Correctional Center (Southern Illinois’ Supermax prison).

“We believe that Tamms has been open ten years too long,” said Lau­rie Jo Reynolds of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign. “Taxpayers deserve to know that the most
expensive adult prison in Illinois is torturing its inmates. We want to see legislation to end the torture of prisoners in Illinois.”

Tamms Closed Maximum Security Prison opened in March of 1998. Prisoners are held in permanent solitary confinement and experience extreme sensory
deprivation and social isolation. Housing a prisoner at Tamms costs nearly twice as much as any other adult prison in Illinois and there is growing concern about the
public safety impact of housing prisoners in conditions that provoke mental illness.

Jean Maclean Snyder, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center of the University of Chicago Law School and Reginald Akkeem Berry, a former Tamms prisoner,
will discuss conditions inside Tamms, Stephen Eisenman, associate professor of art history at Northwestern, will moder­ate this
discussion at BCICS’s Conference Room on April 29th at 4:00 pm.

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AN EVENING OF WRITING FROM SARAJEVO WITH

On May 19th, 2008, BCICS will present an evening of literature from the Bosnian capital, drawn from the pages of Habitus: A Diaspora Journal (habitusmag.com), a Jewish magazine of international literature and culture. Two Chicago-based novelists, Aleksander Hemon and Igor Stiks, will read from their work and discuss their native city with Habitus editor Joshua Ellison.

Fifteen years ago, Sarajevo captured the world’s attention as a symbol of multiplicity and resistance to ethnic hatred. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, Sarajevo weathered a four-year siege and unimaginable destruction. The remarkable writ­ing produced by Sarajevo writers such as Hemon and Stiks is vivid proof that the city’s complexity, vitality, and singularity have not been destroyed.

Aleksander Hemon is the celebrated author of The Question of Bruno (Vintage Books, 2001) and Nowhere Man (Vintage Books, 2004). Hemon was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2004. His fiction appears regularly in The New Yorker. Igor Stiks is the author of A Castle in Romagna (Autumn Hill Books, 2005), which received the Slavic Award for Best First Book. Elijah’s Chair (Fraktura, 2006) received both the Gjalski Award and the Croatian Kiklop Award for the Best Fiction Book of the Year.

Both writers contributed to an issue of Habitus devoted to writing from, and about, Sarajevo. BCICS Director Andrew Wachtel also contributed translations to the volume. Habitus 02: Sarajevo offers creative, audacious perspectives on critical topics like Muslim-Jewish relations, war and genocide, and our broken promises of “never again.” The issue features many esteemed and exciting voices’ including world-renowned Sarajevan writers such as Muharem Bazdulj, Semezdin Mehm­edinovic, and Goran Simic; as well as insights from abroad with David Rieff, Courtney Angela Brkic, Chris Agee, and the photographer Simon Norfolk. These selections are not typical war writing. With humor, drama, and imagination, each text fulfills the words of contributor Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who has described “that passionate artistic desire to distill wild beauty from the spectacle of death.”

Habitus is not simply a magazine about Jews; it is a Jewish magazine about the whole world. Its pages are intended to speak to everyone who feels the pull of complex identities, and who wrestles with what it means to be truly at home.

The event will be co-sponsored by the Center for the Writing Arts and will be held at McCormick Tribune Forum,1870 Campus Drive, Evanston.