Distinguished Voices Lecture Series

Ambassador (ret) D. Bruce Wharton served as an officer in the Foreign Service of the United States working on assignments in countries within Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia. He has provided global strategic leadership for Department of State public diplomacy and public affairs engagement and oversaw the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs, International Information Programs, Public Affairs, and the Global Engagement Center.

Wharton has served in multiple U.S. embassies in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe with temporary duty in Tanzania, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. Gaining numerous accolades from the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency for the work he has done, Wharton has received Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy. He is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin and speaks Spanish and German.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. 

Walter Russell Mead is a Distinguished Fellow at Hudson Institute, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Graduating with honors from Groton and Yale, Mead has served on the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He currently serves on the board of Freedom House.

As an award-winning writer and founding board member of New America, Mead’s work has led him to receive numerous accolades including the Lionel Gelber Award for best book in English on international relations, the Benjamin Franklin Prize and a spot on both The Washington Post and the Economist list of one of the best books of the year. His next book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People will be published later this year.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. 

Melinda Liu has served as Beijing Bureau Chief for Newsweek from 1998 until 2013. She is a veteran foreign correspondent and the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2006 Shorenstein Journalism Award, acknowledging her reporting on Asia.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. 

Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslen Jr. is a United States veteran who served in the U.S. Army for 43 years. His military career culminated in 2018 with his appointment as the 59th superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Under his direction as superintendent, the Academy was recognized as the number one public college in the nation by Forbes Magazine and the number one public college by U.S. News.

Along with many military accolades, Calsen is a member of the Kansas State Engineering College Hall of Fame, and he was awarded the American Red Cross LifeTime of Service Award. Caslen holds a master’s degree in business administration from Long Island University, another master’s in industrial engineering from Kansas State University and an honorary doctorate from Long Island University.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. 

As administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Rajiv Shah, M.D. led the efforts of nearly 10,000 staff in more than 70 countries around the world to advance USAID’s mission of ending extreme poverty and promoting resilient democratic societies. He served as undersecretary and chief scientist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Currently, Shah is president of The Rockefeller Foundation and was named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40.

Shah led President Obama’s landmark Feed the Future and Power Africa initiatives and refocused America’s global health partnerships to end preventable child death. Feed the Future, alone, improved nutrition for 12 million children and empowered more than 7 million farmers. Shah also managed the U.S. Government’s humanitarian response to catastrophic crises around the world, from the 2010 Haiti earthquake to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, awarded Shah with the “Distinguished Service Award.”

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is the coordinator for the Open Russia movement, a platform for civil society and pro-democracy activists, and a member of the federal council of the People’s Freedom Party. Currently a senior adviser at the Institute of Modern Russia, Kara-Murza has served as a political adviser, a journalist, a campaign chairman for a Russian presidential candidate, and an editor-in-chief.

Kara-Murza has testified before the parliaments of several countries and published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He is the author of Reform or Revolution and a contributor to Russian Liberalism: Ideas and People. He earned a master’s degree in of history from the University of Cambridge.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville. 

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School.  Chua has clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and practiced law for four years, working on international transactions throughout Asia, Europe and Latin America. She was named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2011.

Chua’s work has been on the New York Times bestseller list multiple times, and she received many accolades from The Economist and the U.K.’s Guardian for Best Books of 2003. She has appeared on Good Morning America and The Today Show and before the World Bank and CIA. Chua is a graduate of the Harvard Law School.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the World Affairs Council of Jacksonville.