Distinguished Voices Lecture Series

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 history from the University of Cambridge.

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

 James Fallows has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and across the United States. His work has also appeared in many other magazines and as public-radio commentaries since the 1980s. He has won a National Book Award and a National Magazine Award. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.

Deborah Fallows is a linguist and writer who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics. She has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times and The Washington Monthly. She has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media and Georgetown University.

For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallows describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.