Speaker biographies

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at AEI. He was born in Moscow and came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union in June 1978 at the age of twenty-four. Mr. Aron has contributed numerous articles on Russian affairs to newspapers and magazines and writes Russian Outlook, AEI’s quarterly essay on economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Russia’s post-Soviet transition. He is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows. His interviews range from CBS News’ 60 Minutes and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation. Mr. Aron is the author of the first full-length scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin’s, 2000), and he most recently published Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006 (AEI Press, 2007), a compilation of essays analyzing events over the past fifteen years in post-Soviet Russia.

Stephen P. Cohen is president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development (MEPD). He has taught at Harvard University, Hebrew University, Princeton University, Lehigh University and Jewish Theological Seminary, and is currently a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. Mr. Cohen spent six months as a psychological counselor to Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, during which he discovered his life’s mission of making peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. While teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1979, he founded MEPD along with Cyrus Vance, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Shimon Peres. MEPD is now an independent nonprofit organization. Mr. Cohen is also the author of The United States and the Middle East: From Beacon of Hope to Lightning Rod for Resentment (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).

Robert Conquest is a writer, historian, and poet. His works include The Great Terror (1968), which has been translated into twenty languages. Its fortieth anniversary edition, which covers recent archival and other material, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Other works on history and politics include The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), Stalin: Breaker of Nations (1991), Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999), and The Dragons of Expectation (2005). Mr. Conquest served from 1939 in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, ending in the Balkans in 1944–46, and he later served in the British Foreign Service. From 1956, Mr. Conquest has held various academic positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Heritage Foundation, Harvard University, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He served as the literary editor of The Spectator, brought out seven volumes of poetry and one of literary criticism, edited the seminal New Lines anthologies (1955–63), and published a verse translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Prussian Nights (1977). He also published a science fiction novel, A World of Difference (1955), and coauthored the novel The Egyptologists (1965) with Kingsley Amis. In 1997, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. Mr. Conquest is a fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his awards and honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005), Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (1996), and the Jefferson Lectureship (1993).

Anthony Daniels is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He is a retired physician and psychiatrist who most recently practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Often under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, Dr. Daniels has written a column for The Spectator for thirteen years, and he writes regularly for National Review. He has written extensively on medicine, culture, politics, art, and education, and his work has appeared the Los Angeles Times, the Toronto Star, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, and the Australian. Dr. Daniels has appeared on a number of radio and television talk shows, including The O’Reilly Factor, The Mike Rosen Show, and The Fox Forum. Dr. Daniels has published two collections of his City Journal essays: Life at the Bottom (2001) and Our Culture, What's Left of It (2005), as well as a number of works drawing on his medical experiences, such as If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1995), An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine (2001) and Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006).

John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2008, he will serve as acting director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford University. He has also been reappointed a member of the CREEES steering committee for 2007–2010. Mr. Dunlop’s most recent books include Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises: A Critique of Russian Counter-Terrorism (Ibidem-Verlag, 2006).

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt is regularly consulted by governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. He has published over 300 studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988); The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995); The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999); Korea’s Future and the Great Powers (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001); The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis & Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007); and, most recently, Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007).

Lee Edwards is a Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation. One of the chief historians of the American conservative movement, Edwards is also an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Mr. Edwards was the founding director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University, a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, president of the Philadelphia Society, and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. A prolific writer, he has published in several major newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, National Review and Reader’s Digest. He is a frequent commentator on radio and television, including The O’Reilly Factor, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, and CNN. In addition, Mr. Edwards has published more than fifteen books about the leaders of American conservatism, including The Essential Ronald Reagan: A Profile in Courage, Justice and Wisdom (2005) and To Preserve and Protect: The Life of Edwin Meese III (2005).

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar emeritus at AEI. He has taught at the Universities of Illinois, Oregon, and California at Los Angeles, and he has also been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Ninety-Ninth Congress, he served on the staff of the Senate committee on foreign relations. His recent books include Panama’s Canal: What Happens When the United States Gives a Small Country What It Wants (AEI Press 1998), A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously (Transaction, 1998), The Cuban Revolution and the United States (U.S. Cuba Press, 2001) and Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy (AEI Press, 2003). He contributes to AEI’s Latin American Outlook.

Paul Hollander is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. A native of Hungary, he emigrated after the 1956 revolution. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow; a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy; and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. His books include American and Soviet Society: A Comparison (1973), Political Pilgrims (Transaction, 1981), Anti-Americanism (Oxford University Press, 1992), Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism (Yale University Press, 1999), and The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality (Ivan R. Dee, 2006). He edited Understanding Anti-Americanism (Ivan R. Dee, 2004) and From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (ISI Books, 2006). He is also the author of four collections of shorter writings.

Mark Kramer is director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard’s Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Mr. Kramer has worked extensively in the newly opened archives in Russia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and several Western countries. He has served as a consultant for many government agencies and international organizations, including the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Defense Department, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Naval War College, USAID, NATO’s Directorate on Science and Technology, the World Bank, and the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research. He is the author or editor of several books and more than 150 scholarly articles on a wide variety of topics.

Norman M. Naimark is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University, director of Stanford’s Bing Overseas Studies Program, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies. Mr. Naimark has also been a professor of history at Boston University, a fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, and the visiting Kathryn Wasserman Davis Chair of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. Mr. Naimark served as president and a board member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, a member of the Visiting Committee of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard, and chair of the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council. He also serves on the academic advisory board of the Center for Contemporary History Studies in Potsdam, Germany, and is a member of several editorial boards. His books include The Russians In Germany: The History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Harvard University Press, 1995), Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Harvard University Press, 2001), Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Harvard University Press, 1983), and The History of the “Proletariat”: The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887 (Columbia University, 1979).

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News and writes a weekly column called “Congress Inside Out” for Roll Call. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other major publications, and he regularly appears on television programs like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. Mr. Ornstein’s campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the major law (known as McCain-Feingold), that reformed the campaign financing system. He serves as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission and codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. Mr. Ornstein is a member of the boards of the Public Broadcasting Service, the Campaign Legal Center, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future (AEI Press, 2000), and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press, 2006), both with Thomas E. Mann; Debt and Taxes: How America Got Into Its Budget Mess and What to Do About It (AEI Press, 1994), with John H. Makin; and, most recently, Second-Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed  (Brookings Institution Press, 2007), edited with John C. Fortier.

Joshua Rubenstein is the northeast regional director at Amnesty International USA, where he as worked since 1975. Mr. Rubenstein has also been involved in several international projects for the organization, including reorganizing the Israeli section, opening an office in Moscow, research in Uzbekistan, and monitoring police behavior at the 2002 G8 summit in Calgary, Alberta. He is also an associate of the Davis Center. He is the author of Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Beacon Press, 1985), Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Basic Books, 1996), and The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov (Yale University Press, 2005). He is also the coeditor of Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Yale University Press, 2001), which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Eastern European studies for 2001–2002. His newest book, an English-language edition of The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Indiana University Press) is due in December 2007.

Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, an associate of the Institute for Strategic Threat Assessment and Response and a founder and vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Mr. Waldron has taught as a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, Harvard, Princeton, Brown and the Naval War College. He also served as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, was associated with the Solomon Asch Institute for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and has served as a selector for numerous foundations, including the MacArthur Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. He is currently on the boards of the Jamestown Foundation and Freedom House and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the editorial board of War in History. He has written three books and edited four more (including two in Chinese). He has also authored numerous chapters in books, and scholarly articles. Mr. Waldron is coeditor (with Stuart Schram) of the Chinese Civil War volumes of Mao’s Road to Power and coeditor (with David Parrott) of volume four of the forthcoming Cambridge History of War. He is currently working on The Chinese volume for the Blackwell’s “Peoples of the World” series.

Ibn Warraq is a secularist author and former Muslim best known for his bestselling work, Why I Am Not a Muslim. When it was published in 1995, he assumed his pen name, which has historically been used by Islamic dissidents, out of his concern for his personal safety. Mr. Warraq, born in 1946 in India to Muslim parents who immigrated to Pakistan in 1947, studied at a madrassa before his parents sent him to boarding school in England for a secular education. Mr. Warraq, a founder of the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, argues for the reform of Islam. He has published articles in a number of newspapers and journals, including the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, and he has testified before government bodies all over the world. Mr. Warraq is also the editor and translator of What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary and Quest for the Historical Muhammad, editor of Orgins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book, and author of Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Which Koran? Variants, Manuscripts and the Influence of Pre-Islamic Poetry.

Maria Werlau is executive director of the Cuba Archive and president of the Free Society Project, as well as a consultant at Orbis International. Formerly a second vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank, she has been actively involved in the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy and has served on independent task forces on U.S.-Cuban relations for the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Werlau has written extensively on Cuban economics, foreign investment, and policy, and was a news analyst for La Noticia por Dentro (Inside the News), a weekly radio program transmitted in Spanish to Cuba by Radio Martí/Voice of America. Born in Cuba, Ms. Werlau left the country when she was eight months old. Her father, who was initially part of Fidel Castro’s government, died fighting communism.

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