Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to Give Annual Hanify-Howland Lecture

The 52nd annual Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture will be given by Samantha Power, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture, which recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves in the realm of public service in honor of Edward Hanify, a member of the graduating class of 1904, and Weston Howland, will address challenges facing America today. The talk, titled "Why Human Rights Matter More Than Ever," is free and open to the public.

The youngest-ever U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power has been a leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world. One of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, she has spent half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and Harvard professor — and the last eight years helping to shape them. In April 2017, she returned to teaching as the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School, where she is writing a book, "The Education of an Idealist," which will chronicle her years in public service and reflect on the role of human rights and humanitarian ideals in contemporary geopolitics.

As the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, and helped mobilize global action against ISIL. From 2009 to 2013, she served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Called by Forbes "a powerful crusader for U.S foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy," Ambassador Power was named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. Her book, "'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide" won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003.

Before joining the U.S. government, Ambassador Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a columnist for TIME and a National Magazine Award-winning contributor to the Atlantic, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Ambassador Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe. At the age of nine, Power immigrated to the United States from Ireland. She earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Since 1965, the Hanify-Howland lecture series has brought a host of distinguished speakers to Holy Cross who have exemplified in their work the spirit of public service that the series was established to encourage. Past speakers include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; retired Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, U.S. Air Force; Clarence Thomas ’71, associate justice of the United States; Ruth Wedgwood, director of the Program in International Law and Organizations at Johns Hopkins University; investigative journalist Bob Woodward; Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestselling books "Freakonomics"(Harper, 2009) and "Superfreakonomics" (Harper, 2011); award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien; Governor Jon Huntsman; Pulitzer Prize-Winning couple Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; and social entrepreneur Nancy Lublin.

In keeping with the traditional practice of the Hanify-Howland Series, Power will conduct a seminar on campus, which will allow students to interact with the speaker in an intimate and intellectually stimulating environment.