“East Asia and the World” Speaker Series  

Engaging the IU and Hamilton Lugar School Community in Conversations with Leading Experts on East Asian International Affairs and U.S. Asia-Pacific Strategy

Several years ago, I founded the “East Asia and the World” (EATW) Speaker Series at HLS, which I continue to organize personally. This series offers IU Bloomington students and faculty various opportunities to engage with leading thinkers from across the United States and beyond on major issues driving East Asian security, economics, and international and domestic politics.

Since the series began in November 2015, “East Asia and the World” has brought to Bloomington over two dozen scholars and former high-level government officials from such highly esteemed institutions as Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, the Brookings Institution, CSIS, the Paulson Institute, and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few.

Most c isiting speakers in the series offer public lectures on topics of contemporary U.S. foreign policy relevance, such as China’s rise, Japan’s grand strategy, the Korean Peninsula, U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy, and the implications of East Asian economic interdependence for regional security. They also meet with HLS students to discuss their current research and contemporary international politics, as well as to share their own professional experiences and career advice.

The HLS “East Asia and the World” Speaker Series facilitates an important conversation in America’s heartland about the changing nature of global politics and the importance of countries in East Asia to the United States, and to one another. The speaker series engages members of the IU Bloomington community in an ongoing, spirited discussion about how to understand East Asia and its relations with the world, the difficult choices that policymakers face in a dynamic and complicated region, and the impact these decisions have on regional and global peace and prosperity, the United States, and Indiana.

The speaker series is currently seeking outside financial support to ensure its sustainability. So if you happen to be a very generous donor interested in supporting a flagship Midwestern public research university’s ability to engage students with the leading thinkers on contemporary international affairs in East Asia, please contact me. 

Past speakers hosted at IU as part of the “East Asia & the World” series include (listed in chronological order):

• Prof. Thomas J. Christensen (Princeton University), former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
• Amb. Mark Minton (Indiana University), former Ambassador to Mongolia and retired career Foreign Service Officer
• Prof. Richard J. Samuels (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Dr. Sheila A. Smith (Council on Foreign Relations)
• Prof. Oriana Skylar Mastro (Georgetown University)
• Prof. T.J. Pempel (University of California, Berkeley)
• Prof. John Yasuda* (Indiana University)
• Dr. Evan Feigenbaum* (Paulson Institute), former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia; member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff
• Dr. Mireya Solis* (Brookings Institution)
• Prof. Adam P. Liff* (Indiana University)
• Prof. Andrew Oros (Washington College)
• Prof. Michael J. Green (Georgetown University; CSIS), former Senior Asia Director at the U.S. National Security Council
• Prof. Victor D. Cha (Georgetown University; CSIS), former Director for Asian Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council
• Prof. David Bosco (Indiana University)
• Dr. Amy Searight (CSIS), former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, and former Principal Director for East Asian Security at the Pentagon
• Dr. Richard Bush (Brookings Institution), former chairman and managing director at the American Institute in Taiwan, and former national intelligence officer for East Asia
• Mr. Randy Schriver* (Project 2049 Institute; former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs) (co-sponsored with the Alexander Hamilton Society)
• Prof. Avery Goldstein* (University of Pennsylvania)
• Prof. Thomas J. Christensen* (Columbia University), former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
• Prof. Alastair Iain Johnston* (Harvard University)
• Prof. Adam P. Liff* (Indiana University)
• Prof. Fei-Hsien Wang* (Indiana University)
• Prof. Maria Adele Carrai* (New York University)
• Prof. Gardner Bovingdon* (Indiana University)
• Prof. Yinan He* (Lehigh University)
• Prof. Andrew Chubb* (Lancaster University, UK)
• Prof. Andrew Erickson* (US Naval War College)
• Dr. Alison Kaufman* (CNA Corporation)
• Prof. Courtney Fung* (Macquarie University, AUS)
• Prof. Xu Xin* (Cornell University)
• Prof. Dawn Murphy* (U.S. Air War College)
• Prof. Alanna Krolikowski* (Missouri University of Science and Technology)
• Ms. Jean H. Lee* (Wilson Center)
• Mr. Keith Luse* (National Committee on North Korea)
• Mr. Daniel C. Sneider* (Stanford University)
• Prof. Adam P. Liff* (Indiana University)
• Prof. Leif-Eric Easley* (Ewha University)

*Co-sponsored event