UNF: Distinguished Voices Lecture Series

UNF is proud to partner with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville to bring distinguished speakers to our campus. If you have any questions about the lecture series, please contact UNF Events.

For information about other campus events, please search in the online calendar of events.

Registration for WAC lectures goes live about 2 weeks prior to each lecture. See below for exact dates.

2026-2027 Lecture Series Schedule

Jake Sullivan

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Jake Sullivan was the 28th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor), serving in that position for all four years of the Biden Administration. In the Obama Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Biden, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the years between the Obama and Biden administrations, Sullivan was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he wrote a number of articles on the future of American national security and economic policy.  He helped conceive and design a bipartisan project on a new approach to international economic policy, known as “foreign policy for the middle class.”  He also held teaching posts at Yale Law School, Dartmouth College, and the University of New Hampshire. And he served as a senior policy advisor on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

Sullivan holds a B.A. in political science and international studies from Yale College; a M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He grew up as the second of five children in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a proud product of the Minneapolis public schools. He and his wife Maggie Goodlander have a permanent home in New Hampshire.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster

Tuesday, January 12, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

H. R. McMaster was the 25th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years before retiring as a Lieutenant General in June 2018. H.R. is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University, and lecturer at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

H.R. was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army upon graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1984. He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

McMaster has extensive experience leading soldiers and organizations in wartime in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He also served overseas as advisor to the most senior commanders in the Middle East. From 2014 to 2017 McMaster designed the future Army as Director, Army Capabilities Integration Center and Deputy Commanding General, Futures, US Army Training and Doctrine Command. As Commanding General, Maneuver Center of Excellence and Fort Benning, he oversaw all training and education for the Army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force.

H.R. led important strategic assessments including the revision of Iraq strategy during the ‘surge’ of 2007 and efforts to develop security forces and governmental institutions in post-war Iraq. In 2009-2010 he led an assessment and planning effort to develop a comprehensive strategy for the greater Middle East.

McMaster was an assistant professor of history at the United States Military Academy from 1994 to 1996 where he taught undergraduate courses in military history and history of the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as a graduate course on the history of military leadership for officers enrolled in the Columbia University MBA program. He teaches graduate courses at Stanford on contemporary challenges to international security and building strategic competence.

H.R. has authored three New York Times bestselling books. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World examine the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that the United States has faced. Released in August 2024, his latest book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, recollects his time serving under President Trump’s first administration. H.R. has published scores of essays, articles, and book reviews on leadership, history, and the future of warfare in many publications including Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New Republic and The New York Times. He was a contributing editor for Survival: Global Politics and Strategy from 2010-2017. Currently, he hosts the Hoover Institution interview series Today’s Battlegrounds and is a regular on the Hoover Institution broadcast series Goodfellows.

He is a distinguished graduate of the United States Military Academy. His military awards include the Silver Star Medal, the Bronze Star Medal with oak leaf cluster, and the Purple Heart.

Daron Acemoglu

Tuesday, March 30, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and a Research Affiliate at MIT's newly established Blueprint Labs. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty.

He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson).

His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks.

Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021.

He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with Co-Laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.

If you have a disability or require an accommodation for a lecture, please contact
University Development and Alumni Engagement at unfevents@unf.edu five business days before the event to enable us to provide you with the appropriate accommodation.