Margaret MacMillan Lecture in International Relations: Tom Nichols

Lecture Title:
The Global Threat to Democracy
Lecture Description:
Why is democracy under threat in so many nations, including the United States? The answer lies both with autocracies attacking democratic states, and with the internal struggles of democracies themselves.
Speaker Bio:
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic. An expert on international security issues, he taught national security affairs for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College, as well as at the Harvard Extension School, Dartmouth College, and Georgetown University. He was a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and an adjunct at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. In Washington, he was a Fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served on Capitol Hill as personal staff for defense and security affairs to the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of several books on Russia, the Cold War, and international politics. In 2017 he wrote The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, an international best-seller that has been translated into fourteen foreign languages and has been released in an updated and expanded version in 2024. His most recent book is Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy, which Publisher’s Weekly called “A searing critique of contemporary political culture and the rise of illiberalism on both the right and the left.”
He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion and was listed in the Jeopardy Hall of Fame after his 1994 appearances as one of the best players of the game. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in Rhode Island.
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