The Harper Lecture series is offered to the University community across the country and around the world by the University of Chicago Alumni Association. Named for the University's first President, William Rainey Harper, the series carries on his vision of broadly accessible and innovative education.
Event Details
There is good reason to think China's rise might be the most important development in world politics during the 21st century. America is now the dominant great power in the Asia-Pacific region, and it is often a jealous god. That raises the question: is a powerful China likely to clash with the United States? Moreover, can a rising China live peacefully with its neighbors, including Japan, India, and Vietnam? Mearsheimer will argue that, if China's economic growth continues, it will build much more powerful military forces than it now has and attempt to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. However, the US and China's neighbors will go to great lengths to contain China and prevent it from becoming a regional hegemon--leading to an intense security competition in the Asia-Pacific region, with the ever-present danger of war.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science and codirector of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and served five years as an officer in the US Air Force before receiving his PhD from Cornell in 1980. Winner of the 1985 Quantrell Award for distinguished teaching, Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics, publishing numerous journal articles and five books, including the 2011 Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics, which has been translated into ten different languages.
$20 general admission; $10 recent graduate (College alumni of the past ten years and graduate alumni of the past five years).
*Please note that the event is now sold out.
Speaker Profiles
John J. Mearsheimer (Speaker)
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, The University of Chicago
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published five books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into nineteen different languages; and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011).
He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. Furthermore he has written a number of op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, American policy towards India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, and the folly of invading Iraq.
Finally, Professor Mearsheimer has won a number of teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.