September 8 - Barbara Ehrenreich is a social critic and essayist. Her book Nickel and Dimed (2002) was a national bestseller in the United States. Ehrenreich attended Reed College, and later obtained a PhD in biology from The Rockefeller University in New York City. She became involved in politics as an activist for social change. From 1991 to 1997, she was a regular columnist of Time. Currently, Ehrenreich is regular columnist with The Progressive. This event is co-sponsored with the English Department and the Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecture Series.

September 24 - Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. His publications include Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism; Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, and "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” among others. He has taught international relations at Dartmouth College and air power strategy for the USAF's School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pittsburgh. His current work focuses on the causes of suicide terrorism and the politics of unipolarity.

September 28 - Nathaniel Fick graduated with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1999, earning degrees in Classics and Government, and wrote a senior thesis on Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and its implications for American foreign policy. Fick was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps upon graduation, and trained as an infantry officer. Fick is also the author of “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer”. Fick will discuss the legacy America has created with its involvement in Afghanistan.

October 8 - Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy. During the 2008 presidential election, she was senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, responsible for policy development and outreach in the areas of foreign and defense policy. Dr. Schake previously held senior positions at the National Security Council and Department of State where she worked on resourcing and organizational effectiveness issues, including a study of what it would take to “transform” the state department so as to enable integrated political, economic, and military strategies.

October 20 - Richard Longworth is a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at DePaul University. He is the author of the book, Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism, published in 2008 by Bloomsbury USA. Longworth joined the Council in 2003 as executive director of its Global Chicago Center after a career in journalism, most recently as senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

October 22- Andrew Revkin has spent nearly a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. He has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times in three years. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the Pole. He spearheaded a three-part Times series and one-hour documentary in 2005 on the transforming Arctic.

October 29 - Joshua Spero, Ph.D., will present “National and International Leadership Through Service.” Spero is a former senior civilian strategic planner, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Associate Professor of Political Science, Fitchburg State College. Spero's presentation will be followed with a discussion led by Marija Ignjatovic '03, Dan Sharpe '06, and Lydia Spitalny '08. Ignjatovic is currently the Desk Officer, Western Balkans Cluster, Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS for the United Nations Development Programme. Sharpe works for the Columbus Foundation and currently is a project manager for the easyColumbus initiative. Spitalny graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2008 and most recently completed work in Kenya with the Education Centre for Women in Democracy.

November 10 - Bonnie Honig is a senior research fellow for the American Bar Foundation, specializes in the areas of contemporary political, democratic and feminist theory. She has written on the hidden costs of legitimation in political theory and practice, the cultural politics of immigration, conceptions of time and progress in political and legal thinking, discretion and emergency power, popular constitutionalism, and, most recently, on the conflict between justice and mourning in Sophocles’ Antigone.