For 2025, the IU Hamilton Lugar School Area Studies Centers have covered the cost of the Briefing Book for program participants.
To register to attend the lectures, please email Jean Cook (Meadowood) at jeancook37@gmail.com or Mary Anheuser (University Club) at maryanheuser@gmail.com
Thank you!
Date: The date is the second (2nd) Tuesday of the month.
- Tuesday, January 14, 2025 - Registration Day
- Tuesday, February 11, 2025
- Tuesday, April 8, 2025
- Tuesday, May 13, 2025
- Tuesday, June 10, 2025
- Tuesday, September 9, 2025
- Tuesday, October 14, 2025
- Tuesday, November 11, 2025
- Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Time: Please check the DETAILS for EACH program.
1:15-2:30 pm – Presentations are In-Person at Meadowood, unless otherwise announced.
The U.S., polarized and divided, faces a world overflowing with challenges, dangers, and uncertainties. Conflict and disorder have become the defining features of world politics.
Time: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Ambassador Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi
Feisal Amin Rasoul al-Istrabadi centers his research interests on the interstices between law, politics, and policy in the region from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. He is deeply engaged with security issues, diplomacy, and US policy as they relate to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. His research also focuses on problems of democratization, constitutionalism, post-conflict justice, state-building, identity politics, and the rule of law generally in the region. He is internationally recognized as a leading expert on the Iraqi Constitution and the post-2003 period. Professor al-Istrabadi is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
A double alumnus of Indiana University, al-Istrabadi was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary and Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations in 2004 and served in the Office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2012. Amb. al-Istrabadi was principal legal drafter of the Iraqi interim constitution of 2004. He lectures often at universities and policy institutes and appears frequently in national and international media. He is Affiliate Professor of Law at the IU Maurer School of Law and a Professor by Courtesy at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
There is one thing that people can actually agree on across the aisle in Washington, DC: The United States is in a strategic competition with a rising China that poses a range of economic, political, and military security challenges.
Time: April 8, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Dr. Hong Zhang
Hong Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Department. With a PhD in Public Policy from George Mason University, her research focuses on China’s role in global development, particularly in infrastructure development and industrialization. Her fieldwork has taken her to various countries in Asia and Africa to examine China’s developmental impact. She co-edits the People’s Map of Global China and the Global China Pulse journal, initiatives that foster collective efforts to study China’s global presence. Prior to joining Indiana University, she was a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (2022-2024), a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program (2021-2022). She holds a Master's degree in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Renmin University of China.
Over the past two presidential terms, the U.S. has strongly pivoted away from neoliberalism as a foreign economic policy approach.
Time: Tuesday, May 13, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Dr. Daniel Preston
Dan Preston is a clinical professor, director of the Master of International Affairs degree program, and an affiliate faculty member at the Russian and East European Institute and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University. Professor Preston's academic and professional work focuses on mobilizing finance for international development.
He teaches courses covering topics ranging from public affairs and international comparative policy to finance and economic development. The study abroad courses he created enable students to study security and development in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, comparative policy and governance in Cuba, and sustainable development in Portugal. He collaborates with and advises various leading international organizations and think tanks such as the OECD, World Economic Forum, Center for Global Development, United Nations, and African Center for Economic Transformation. He serves the university in many capacities involving degree program management, international internships, curriculum, strategic planning, personnel review, overseas education, course internationalization, and peer assessment of teaching. Outside of the university, he leads Watershed Finance LLC, a global advisory firm focused on mobilizing investment for sustainable development and climate solutions.
Professor Preston's professional interests include financing for development, institutional investment, banking, sustainable development, and country competitiveness. His professional and personal experiences have spanned 70 countries and territories. Prior to O'Neill, he held investment banking positions with Citigroup in the U.S. and France specializing in economic advisory, debt management, and capital raising for sovereign governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia and securitization programs for corporations primarily in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Japan. He also worked as a management consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Information Resources on a range of strategic issues for Fortune 500 companies, technology start-ups, and the U.S. government.
As the Republic of India marks its 75th anniversary in January 2025, the world’s most populous nation and largest democracy continues to defy simple categorization.
Time: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Dean John Ciorciari
John D. Ciorciari has research interests in international politics and international law. Much of his work focuses on international politics in the Indo-Pacific region. His first book, The Limits of Alignment (2010), explored the foreign policy preferences of small states and middle powers navigating great-power rivalry. He has written on U.S., Chinese and Indian foreign policies and engagement in Southeast Asia, and he co-edited The Courteous Power (2021) with Kiyoteru Tsutsui, examining Japan’s distinctive approach to the region.
Ciorciari also has published widely on peacebuilding, including studies of United Nations interventions and international criminal tribunals. He is the author of Sovereignty Sharing in Fragile States (2021), examining when and how international actors have shared core governance functions with sovereign states including Cambodia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Timor Leste. He has conducted extensive research on hybrid criminal tribunals and co-authored the book Hybrid Justice (2014) with Anne Heindel, a detailed account of law and politics at the UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia.
Before joining IU, Ciorciari was a Professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where he served as Associate Dean for Research and Policy Engagement and as director of the Weiser Diplomacy Center and International Policy Center. He has been an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, an Asia Society Fellow, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, a policy official in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of International Affairs, and an associate at the international law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell. He is a longstanding senior legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Over the past 30 years, climate change has become one of the central global challenges of the modern era, one that has hugely important consequences for the livability of the planet.
Time: Tuesday, September 9, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: TBA
Europe is frightened and frightening for the first time really since the 1980s, when nuclear sabers were rattling as the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) both deployed contending intermediate range missiles along the dividing line of the military alliances. With Russia’s continued barbarity in Ukraine there is no escaping that Vladimir Putin intends not to be “European.”
Time: Tuesday, October 14, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Dr. Justyna Zając
Justyna Zając is Professor of Practice in European Security Studies in the Departments of International Studies and Political Science. She also teaches regularly at the European Academy of Diplomacy in Poland.
Professor Zając’s interests revolve around transatlantic and European security, with a focus on Poland’s foreign and security policy. She served on several executive bodies of the Polish government, including the National Strategic Review Committee appointed by the President of the Republic of Poland and the Council of Young Scientists of the Minister of Science and Higher Education, where she served as chairperson. She authored several expert opinions for Poland’s Ministry of Regional Development and National Security Bureau as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
Professor Zając was a visiting scholar at George Washington University, Science Po, and the University of Belgrade, and she is a recipient of several fellowship and awards from the European Union, Ambassade de France en Pologne, the Kościuszko Foundation, and the Galilee College. She was also a two-term member of the Steering Committee of the Standing Group on International Relations of the European Consortium for Political Research.
Professor Zając has published numerous books and papers in Poland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Jordan. Her most recent book Poland’s Security Policy: The West, Russia, and the Changing International Order was published by Palgrave Macmillan (2016). Her articles appeared in European Foreign Affairs Review, The National Interest, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West, Against the Current, Rocznik Integracji Europejskiej (Yearbook of European Integration), and La Lettre de l’IRSEM, among others.
She teaches courses on European Union politics; contemporary security in Europe; security, diplomacy and global governance; and theories of international politics. In 2024, IU President Pamela Whitten recognized Professor Zając’s excellent and innovative work with students on the project on Hybrid Threats in Europe prepared for the U.S. State Department.
Since fall 2021, Professor Zając has been Director of the IU Polish Studies Center, an academic unit that for almost five decades has been providing intellectual leadership at institutional and national levels and has supported Polish-related research around the world.
Artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, is often claimed as an emerging technology that will disrupt all facets of society.
Time: Tuesday, November 11, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Dr. Scott J. Shackelford
Professor Scott J. Shackelford is the Provost Professor of Business Law and Ethics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. He serves as the Executive Director of the Ostrom Workshop and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. He is also an Affiliated Scholar at both the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.
Professor Shackelford has written more than 100 articles, book chapters, essays, and op-eds for diverse publications. Similarly, Professor Shackelford’s research has been covered by an array of outlets, including Politico, NPR, CNN, Forbes, Time, the Washington Post, and the LA Times. He is the author of Forks in the Digital Road: Key Decisions in the History of the Internet (Oxford University Press, 2024), The Internet of Things: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020), Governing New Frontiers in the Information Age: Toward Cyber Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Managing Cyber Attacks in International Law, Business, and Relations: In Search of Cyber Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is also the lead editor of the first volume dedicated to cyber peace entitled Cyber Peace: Charting a Path Toward a Sustainable, Stable, and Secure Cyberspace (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Both Professor Shackelford’s academic work and teaching have been recognized with numerous awards, including a Harvard University Research Fellowship, a Stanford University Hoover Institution National Fellowship, a Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study Distinguished Fellowship, the 2014 Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the 2015 Elinor Ostrom Award, and the 2022 Poets & Quants Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors Award.
Analysts of American policy in 2025 have the unusual advantage of being able to assess the new president’s likely policies against the backdrop of what he did in his first term, four years earlier. The prognosis is not positive.
Time: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 Program: 1:15 – 2:30 pm (EST)
In-Person Location: Meadowood Retirement Community: Terrace Room
Masks optional, unless notified otherwise
Presenter: Ambassador Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi
Feisal Amin Rasoul al-Istrabadi centers his research interests on the interstices between law, politics, and policy in the region from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. He is deeply engaged with security issues, diplomacy, and US policy as they relate to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. His research also focuses on problems of democratization, constitutionalism, post-conflict justice, state-building, identity politics, and the rule of law generally in the region. He is internationally recognized as a leading expert on the Iraqi Constitution and the post-2003 period. Professor al-Istrabadi is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
A double alumnus of Indiana University, al-Istrabadi was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary and Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations in 2004 and served in the Office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2012. Amb. al-Istrabadi was principal legal drafter of the Iraqi interim constitution of 2004. He lectures often at universities and policy institutes and appears frequently in national and international media. He is Affiliate Professor of Law at the IU Maurer School of Law and a Professor by Courtesy at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
