The Annual Harriman Lectures

Harriman Lectures

  The Eleventh Annual Harriman Lecture was held on Friday, 13 September 2002 in the Altschul Auditorium in the School of International and Public Affairs Building.  Delivered by H. E. Dr. Vojislav Kostunica, President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Lecture History

The Annual W. Averell Harriman Lectures were inaugurated in 1989 to honor the memory of our principal benefactor by making a special intellectual contribution to the University community and to our field. We do this by each year inviting a preeminent scholar, political figure, or cultural luminary related in some way to our area of study to deliver a major address for the entire University community and many other guests. Each Lecture is followed by a reception at which members of the audience can meet the speaker, and the texts of the Lectures are published.

Past Lectures

The Tenth Annual Harriman Lecture was held on 11 March 2002, in the Rotunda of Low Library.  Russia:  Today and the Future! Delivered by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, with a  live simulcast of the event in  the Roone Arledge Cinema, 2nd Floor of Lerner Hall. This event was co-sponsored by Columbia University Press.  

W. Averell Harriman Lecturers to date have been Alexander Yakovlev, counselor and key advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and one of the prime architects of perestroika; world-renowned scholars Barrington Moore, Ernest Gellner, Dmitrii Sergeyevich Likhachev, and Alec Nove; and Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the great figures of 20th-century Russian literature.

Lectures are generally single ones, and their texts are published by the Institute. In 1996, however, Andrei Sinyavsky presented a series of three consecutive lectures, and their text is was published by Columbia University Press, as the Russian Intelligentsia as were the lectures by Katherine Verdery entitled The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. In 1999 former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Schmidt spoke on "The 21st Century in Europe—Risks, Opportunities and Probabilities."  In 2000 the lecture were presented in three talks by Moshe Lewin, The USSR, Three Historical Probes.  Harriman Lecture I: The 1930s: A System and a Psyche, on October 19th; Harriman Lecture II: The USSR’s 1960s: In Quest of Modernization; Harriman Lecture III:  Russia’s Twentieth Century: The Burdens of History.