The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will present the Inaugural Gandhi-King Lecture on International Relations and Peace Studies on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Brooks Hall Room 202 on the downtown campus. The lecture series will become an annual event.

George A. Lopez, 2009-2010 Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow with the United States Institute of Peace, will explore the relevance of the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as they relate to the contemporary issues of terrorism and weapons proliferation, and the teaching of peace studies.

Lopez is widely recognized as one of the premier peace researchers in the United States. He is a founding faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC Chair in Peace Studies. His research interests focus primarily on the problems of state violence and coercion, specifically economic sanctions, gross violations of human rights and ethics and the use of force.

Lopez wrote and co-edited Winning Without War: Sensible Security Options for Dealing with Iraq with David Cortright and Alistair Millar in October 2002. This policy brief was called the most influential document for those favoring an alternative to war with Iraq.

Since 2001, much of his writing has been devoted to debates “in the public square” regarding ethics and the use of force in the global war on terror, Iraq and elsewhere. His commentaries have been published in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Indianapolis Star. In 2005 and 2006, La Opinion published a series of monthly editorials by Lopez. Longer essays on these themes have appeared in Sojourner’s, America and Commonweal magazines.

One of Notre Dame’s most popular and innovative teachers, George Lopez is a two-time winner of the Kaneb Teaching Award (2001, 2004), the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha teaching award (2005), and the Notre Dame Student Government Frank O’Malley Teaching Award (2008).

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase conflict management capacity, tools and intellectual capital worldwide.

For more information about the event, please contact Brenda.Riggle@mail.wvu.edu.

For directions to the event, please visit http://visit.wvu.edu/directions.

-WVU-

CONTACT: Rebecca Herod, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
304-293-7405 ext. 5251, Rebecca.Herod@mail.wvu.edu