Dr. Nick Cullather, associate professor at Indiana University, will deliver the annual Robert B. Walz Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 20, in Foundation Hall at the Donald W. Reynolds Campus and Community Center on the campus of Southern Arkansas University, Magnolia. Cullather’s address is “Intelligence ‘Failures’ and the Politics of Knowledge in U.S. Foreign Relations.”
Cullather has previously been staff historian at the Central Intelligence Agency, press secretary for Congressman Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and associate editor of the Journal of American History. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has been teaching at Indiana University since 1993.
His Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (1999) described the U.S. role in the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Cullather was one of several historians hired by the CIA to use newly declassified documents to examine major American covert operations. His book was praised in the Journal of American History as a “vivid cautionary tale about how the cloak of secrecy allowed government officials to avoid questions of perspective, of proportion, and of right and wrong.”
Cullather has also written Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippines Relations, 1942-1960 (1994) and Managing Nationalism: United States National Security Council Documents on the Philippines, 1953-1960 (1992). He has co-authored Making a Nation: The United States and Its People (2001), a comprehensive college-level textbook.
In 2003 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study and teach in Singapore. His research has also been supported by grants from the Rockefeller Archive Center, the U.S. Air Force, and the Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship Program.
Dr. Robert Walz taught history at SAU from 1958 to 1987 and was recognized as a leading historian of Arkansas. The Walz Lectureship was established in 1995 with a bequest from the estate of Mrs. Curtistine A. Walz, in honor of her husband’s long service to the University.
The Walz Lecture is free and open to the public. A reception for Cullather will follow in Salon B of Grand Hall at the Reynolds Center.
For more information call 870-235-4227.
