• Lund-Gill Chair
• 2008, Stephen Kinzer
• 2007, David Bevington
• 2006, Leon M. Lederman

Lund-Gill Chair

This year’s holder of the Lund-Gill Chair is journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer. The chair is named for former Dominican University President Sr. Candida Lund, OP, and former English professor, Sr. Cyrille Gill, OP.

Each year, the Lund-Gill Chair in the Rosary College Arts and Sciences brings to campus an individual of the highest moral and intellectual reputation who can address themes and issues at the heart of the liberal arts and sciences.

Kinzer will teach an honors course titled “American Empire” in the Fall 2008 semester. Students will learn how American invasions, coups and interventions have shaped the history of the world, and of America’s perception of its global role.

About Stephen Kinzer

As a Journalist

In his work as a journalist with the Boston Globe and New York Times Kinzer saw how America’s grand strategies encountered regular people and their aspirations – from the hills of Nicaragua to the deserts of Central Asia. He’s reported:

• Central American’s guerrilla war and American intervention in the 1980s
• Central and Eastern Europe’s new democracies in the early 1990s.
• Turkey and the newly independent states of Central Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

He was awarded the Maria Moor Cabot prize in 1988 for ‘’distinguished contributions to the advancement of inter-American understanding and freedom of information” for his work in Central America. Kinzer continues to work as a columnist for the London Guardian, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and as a commentator and freelance journalist for other publications.

As a Historian

All the while Kinzer has been digging deep, writing the history behind the headlines in a series of critically acclaimed and best-selling books. He began in 1982 with Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, which detailed the CIA’s backing of the 1954 coup that threw that Central American nation into decades of bloodshed. After his award-winning tenure with the New York Times in Nicaragua he wrote the inside account of the Sandinista revolution and Contra war in Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua.

In the 1990s Kinzer turned to the East for his next two books. In All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror he told the riveting, and ultimately disastrous, story of the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran. He drew on his knowledge acquired as the Istanbul correspondent for the New York Times to write Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds.

In the wake of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Kinzer gave his readers the long view of American foreign policy adventures in Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. His next book will be in bookstores this summer. In A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It he tells the amazing story of Paul Kagame, a refugee who built and led a rebel army, stopped a genocide and began the rebuilding of Rwanda.