George Washington Forum News and Events

Frank Dikötter (University of Hong Kong)

Frank Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. Before coming to Hong Kong he was Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He graduated with his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies after doing his undergraduate work at the University of Geneva. He has published a dozen books, including the People’s Trilogy about modern China. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious book award for non-fiction. The second instalment, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957, was short-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2014. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 concludes the trilogy and was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize in 2017.

Zena Hitz (St. John's College)

Zena Hitz is Tutor at St. Johns College, Annapolis. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Princeton after doing her undergraduate work at St. John’s College, Annapolis, and after graduate degrees in classics and philosophy at Cambridge and Chicago. Before returning to teach at St. John’s in 2015, she taught philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Auburn and McGill. Her most recent book is Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020), a defense of intellectual activity for its own sake.

Anne Rathbone Bradley (The Fund for American Studies)

Anne Rathbone Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the academic director at The Fund for American Studies. Previously, Dr. Bradley served as the vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics. In addition to her work with TFAS, she is a professor of economics at The Institute for World Politics at Grove City College. She is a visiting professor at George Mason University and has previously taught at Georgetown University and Charles University in Prague. She is currently an Acton Affiliate scholar and a visiting scholar at the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy. She is a lecturer for the Institute for Humane Studies and the Foundation for Economic Education.

Jakub Grygiel (Catholic University of America)

Jakub Grygiel is Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America and a senior advisor at The Marathon Initiative. In 2017-2018 he was a Senior Advisor in the Office of Policy Planning at the Department of State. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and on the faculty of SAIS-Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. He graduated from Georgetown Univeristy with a BSFS before earning a PhD and MPA from Princeton. He is the author of Return of the Barbarians (2018), Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (2006), and co-author with Wess Mitchell of The Unquiet Frontier (2016). His writings have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, National Interest, Claremont Review of Books, Orbis, Commentary, Parameters, as well as several U.S. and foreign newspapers.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Society Ohio University chapter.

Matthew Crawford (University of Virginia)

Matthew Crawford is a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Culture at the University of Virginia. After majoring in physics as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009) and The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in the Age of Distraction (2015). His latest book is Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (2020).