Lectures by an acknowledged leadership expert and a Holocaust survivor will close out the David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas series at West Virginia University for this academic year.

Barbara Kellerman, the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, will be in Morgantown on March 18, followed by Holocaust survivor Marcel Drimer on April 1.

Both events begin at 7:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public. No tickets are required.

Kellerman, whose appearance is co-sponsored by the Nath Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series and the F. Duke Perry Professorship in Leadership Studies, is the founding executive director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She serves on the advisory boards of Leadership, a women and leadership project of the American Association of University Women, and the Brookings Institution Leadership Initiative.

In 2009, she was ranked by Forbes.com as a “Top 50 Business Thinker,” and in 2008 and 2010, Leadership Excellence placed her in the top 15 of “thought leaders in management and leadership.” She has been awarded the Wilbur M. McFeeley award by the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership. Just last year, she was ranked by Global Gurus 13th in the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”

Kellerman is co-founder of the International Leadership Association and author and editor of numerous books, including her most recent, Hard Times: Leadership in America, which highlights the importance of context in leadership to create change. Her book, The End of Leadership, was long listed by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2012. She appears often as a television commentator and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the Harvard Business Review. She regularly blogs at barbarakellerman.com.

Drimer’s visit is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Drimer was born in Drohobycz, Poland, a small town now part of Ukraine. The town fell under Soviet control on Sept. 1, 1939, but it wasn’t until 1941, after Germany violated the German-Soviet Pact and occupied Drohobycz with its forces, that Drimer and his mother, father and sister were forced into the ghetto, where they hid in secret bunkers to avoid deportation to the Belzec death camp.

After his father bribed a guard, the family escaped to Mlynki Szkolnikowe, a small village where a brave Ukrainian family hid them in their stable. Fearing capture by the Nazis, the Drimer family spent the harsh winter of 1943 in a hole in the ground.

In August 1944, the Soviet army liberated Drimer and his family. Because of the hunger and physical deprivation he experienced during hiding, Drimer had to relearn how to walk. Eventually, the Drimers moved to Walbrzych, where Drimer finished high school. He went on to engineering college in Wroclaw and, in 1961, moved to the United States. Today he serves as a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum volunteer, sharing his story of survival and triumph.

-WVU-

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