Pulitzer-winning author addresses human rights, genocide in Cornell lecture

MOUNT VERNON — Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer for her 2002 book chronicling U.S. policy toward genocide in the 20th century, will speak on “Iraq’s Collateral Damage” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.

Power’s visit is for the Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, “The Liberal Arts and the Public Square,” funded by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich. Admission to the lecture is free.

Irish-born Power is professor of public practice in public policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for general nonfiction.

As a recent college graduate, Power covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996 as a freelance journalist for U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe and the Economist. She returned to the United States when the Holocaust was in the public eye, with the opening of a museum in Washington, D.C., the release of a Steven Spielberg movie on the Holocaust and the vow that “never again” would genocide be tolerated. Yet the response from the current administration to the murder of Muslims in Sarajevo and elsewhere was passive.

In “A Problem from Hell,” she examines America’s policy toward genocide, documenting the moral failures of those in power yet celebrating individuals during the 20th century who have spoken out about genocide.

Power is a graduate of Yale University, majoring in history, and Harvard Law School. She was founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from 1998 to 2002.

Power’s is the seventh lecture in the Earhart-Cornell series, which previously has featured U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould; social philosopher and author Michael Novak; Yale University law professor and author Stephen Carter; Harvard University legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon; and Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator.

Robert Birnbaum interview with Samantha Power

Interview with Samantha Power at the Institute for International Studies, UC Berkeley