Farewell frost!
October 30, 2024
EVANSTON, Ill. -- Acclaimed public policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter will discuss the world’s danger zones and the methods analysts use to assess global risks when she delivers the 25th annual Richard W. Leopold Lecture at Northwestern University.
The address, “Hot Spots and Blind Spots: A New Way For America to Look at the World” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St. on the Evanston campus. A free reception will follow.
Slaughter, the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, made waves with her 2012 article in The Atlantic, \"Why Women Still Can't Have It All.” The essay spawned a renewed national debate on obstacles to male-female equality.
Free and open to the public, Slaughter’s Leopold Lecture will cover what’s happening in the world’s danger zones and where things are heading in these influential areas. Political analysts often operate with a chessboard-like strategy, while economic analysts tend toward online news sources on the Web, said Slaughter. Both frameworks are necessary when assessing global risks, she argues.
At the New America Foundation, Slaughter leads a team of scientists, technologists and political and economic thinkers who develop solutions for problems involving national security, healthcare, technology policy, education and other issues.
Recently, during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, Slaughter predicted a 10-to 15-year brutal conflict in the Middle East, one stemming from both religious wars and territorial claims.
In an interview with Fortune magazine, she criticized the White House for not recognizing “both the spreading and fueling of extremism.”
“It was evident that unless we intervened, it was just going to spread,” she said. “But the White House did not want to get involved in another Middle East war, so we effectively limited our assistance to humanitarian aid on the side.”
Slaughter is currently the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She was the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, a position she held from 2009 to 2011.
On Twitter, Slaughter provides frequent commentary for both mainstream and new media and aggragates foreign policy news for over 108,000 followers. Her bio reads: “Former Princeton Professor & Director of Policy Planning, U.S. State Dept. Mother. Mentor. Foodie. Foreign policy curator.”
Though a respected voice on the foreign policy front, Slaughter is perhaps better known for her Atlantic article questioning whether women can actually achieve a work-life balance. The essay quickly became the most-read article in the magazine’s history.
In a follow-up Ted Talk titled “Can We All ‘Have It All?” Slaughter argued “real equality, full equality, does not just mean valuing women on male terms. It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men. And to get there, we have to change our workplaces, our policies and our culture.”
The Richard W. Leopold Lecture was established in 1990 by Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The lecture honors Richard Leopold, a prominent and popular diplomatic historian. Leopold influenced the lives of countless American historians and public figures, including Northwestern alums former Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo) and television and movie producer Garry Marshall.
Past Leopold lecturers include Richard D. Lugar, Russ Feingold, David Gergen, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, George McGovern and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
