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John O’Sullivan | Janina Ochojska | Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright | Andrzej Olechowski | Norman Ornstein | Constantinos Orphanides | David Ost | Ulrike Ottinger

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is Editor of The National Interest; former Editor-in-Chief, United Press International, and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. (2003)

November 11, 2003

Janina Ochojska

Janina Ochojska is President of the Polish Humanitarian Organization (PHO) which she founded in 1994, following a trip to war-torn Bosnia with a French humanitarian convoy. PHO was the first such organization created in Eastern Europe to help victims of war, natural disasters and severe poverty in, among other places, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. It also runs aid programs to help children in need in Poland. For her work, Ochojska has received several awards, including, in 1993, the European Woman of the Year title from the European Commission. She writes frequently about humanitarian issues. (2005)

April 12, 2005

Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is the translator of Beauty and the Best: The Aesthetic Moment in Science, originally written in German by Ernst Peter Fischer. She has been translating Zafer Senocak and other contemporary German poets for years, and her work has been featured in such publication as the Seneca Review, Exchanges, Agni, and Another Chicago Magazine. Winner of the Gary Wilson Award from the University of Arkansas Press and Agni’s William J. Arrowsmith Translation Award, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Literary Translators Association, and the University of Arkansas Fulbright College. Editor of German language poetry in New European Poets (Graywolf 2008), she has taught classes and workshops in translation at Boston University, Oberlin College, and the University of Arkansas. Door Languages, her translations of poetry by Zafer Senocak, appeared with Zephyr Press in October 2008. (2008)

March 19, 2009

Andrzej Olechowski

European Deputy Chairman of the Trilateral Commission and former Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. (2004)

September 13, 2004

Norman Ornstein

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News. In addition, Ornstein writes for USA Today as a member of its Board of Contributors and writes a weekly column called “Congress Inside Out” for Roll Call newspaper. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other major publications, and regularly appears on television programs such as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. His campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the McCain/Feingold law that reformed the campaign financing system. He is also co-directing a multi-year effort, called the Transition to Governing Project, to create a better climate for governing in the era of the permanent campaign. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Campaign Legal Center and of the Board of Trustees of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future and Intensive Care: How Congress Shapes Health Policy, both with Thomas E. Mann; and Debt and Taxes: How America Got into Its Budget Mess and What to Do about It, with John H. Makin. (2005)

September 24-25, 2005

Constantinos Orphanides

Consul General of Greece in Boston (2007)

March 28, 2007

David Ost

David Ost joined the faculty at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1986, after earning his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to that he spent several years studying and living in Eastern Europe supported by a variety of nationally competitive fellowships, including Fulbright. During his tenure at the Colleges he has been awarded additional fellowships and has returned to do research in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe on numerous occasions. Most recently he was a Senior Fulbright Professor at Central European University and Warsaw University (1998-‘99) and has also served, on occasion, as a visiting professor at Central European University in Warsaw and in Budapest. In August of 2006, Ost was invited onto the editorial board of the journal “Politics and Society,” one of the leading publications in both political science and sociology.

Ost is the author of two books on Polish politics: Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (1990), and The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (2005); co-author of Workers After Workers’ States (2001); and co-author of the textbook European Politics in Transition (now in its fifth edition). He has more than 40 articles published in journals, has contributed op-eds to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and has been featured on the BBC, PBS, the “McNeil-Lehrer Report” and on numerous major radio stations.

Ost speaks fluent Polish and near-fluent Russian. (2004)

December 5, 2004

Ulrike Ottinger

An original and provocative voice in German cinema since her debut in the mid-1970s, Ulrike Ottinger came to film from painting and photography, well-versed in contemporary feminist theory and criticism. After making several short films, Ottinger immediately asserted her presence with her first feature, “Madame X–An Absolute Ruler” (1977), a bizarre, campy, feminist pirate movie, featuring a spike-fisted, leather-clad dominatrix captain played by underground icon Tabea Blumenschein (who had co-directed one of Ottinger’s shorts). Ottinger’s other films include “Freak Orlando” (1981), her unforgettable homage to both Tod Browning’s classic horror film “Freaks” and Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel “Orlando”. Continuing her penchant for revision and quotation, she also made “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1983), in which Oscar Wilde’s famous character is played by a woman.

An openly lesbian figure, Ottinger calls for an understanding of the disenfranchised (women, gays, alcoholics, the handicapped, the poor) but, beyond that, she offers a visually enthralling examination of some of the stranger and more wonderful aspects of contemporary popular culture and diverse ethnic cultural heritages.