Hi Annual Lecture and Alumni Award

All welcome. Reception following these events.

“State of Disaster: The Environmental and Policy Disasters That Drive Migration From Central America” María Cristina García, Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies, Cornell University

What policies should the United States adopt in response to the growing number of climate refugees? Historian María Cristina García examines U.S. responses to environmental disasters in Central America to see what lessons might be learned for shaping humanitarian and immigration policies in an era of accelerating climate change. Central America has been vulnerable to sudden-onset disasters like hurricanes and slower-developing conditions like drought, but the region has also suffered from policy failures that pile disaster upon disaster, forcing people to migrate within their countries and across international borders, where they have few legal protections. García’s presentation offers a view into some of the challenges of the present and future.

Alumni Award:

Paul Hendrickson, Senior Lecturer Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once—for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway's Boat was both a New York Times and London best-seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.