UPDATED: February 10, 2019 at 4:07 p.m.

Speakers for this semester’s University Lectures series will include an award-winning radio journalist, an internationally-renowned research engineer and the director of education at a foreign policy think tank, Syracuse University announced on Friday.

Nina Totenberg, an NPR  legal affairs correspondent, will give the first lecture at SU’s Hendricks Chapel on March 5. The American Bar Association has recognized Totenberg seven times for her legal reporting, and she was the first radio journalist to be awarded Broadcaster of the Year by the National Press Foundation.

NPR won the George Foster Peabody Award for its coverage, led by Totenberg, of events following Anita Hill’s 1991 allegations of sexual harassment by Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas.

Her lecture is sponsored by the Maxwell School for Citizenship and Public Affairs and the S.I Newhouse School of Public Communications, as well as the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, The Tully Center for Free Speech and SU’s College of Law.

Research engineer and LGBTQ+ advocate Lynn Conway is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science emerita at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She will speak at Hendricks on March 26. The lecture is sponsored by SU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Conway worked as a researcher at computer hardware company IBM until the company discovered she was undergoing gender transition and fired her.

But she restarted her career after transitioning. While working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Conway’s simplified methods of designing silicon chips transformed microelectronics in Silicon Valley.

Conway retired in 1999, after which she came out as a transgender woman and developed her trans-support website lynnconway.com. She is a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Martin Indyk serves as the director of executive education at the Council on Foreign Relations, an U.S foreign policy-focused think tank. He has also been a Brookings Institution John C. Whitehead Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy, and was executive vice president of the institute from February 2015 to March 2018.

He served as founding executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for eight years before entering the government. Indyk was the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 1995 to 1997 and 2000 to 2001, and he was special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014.

Indyk served in former President Bill Clinton’s administration from from 1993 to 1995 and from 1997 to 2000. His lecture at Hendricks on April 16 is being sponsored by Maxwell.

All three lectures are free to the public and will begin at 7:30 p.m.

This is the 18th season of University Lectures. Previous semesters have included lectures from award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien, Chief Executive Officer of the International WELL Building Institute Rick Fedrizzi and historian Jill Lepore.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Nina Totenberg’s name was misspelled. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on February 8, 2019 at 9:38 pm

Contact India: irmiragl@syr.edu