Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Šumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is also Distinguished Professor and the Tagore Chair Emeritus at Indiana University—Bloomington. 

Ganguly is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over twenty books on the contemporary politics of South Asia. His most recent book, co-edited with Klaus Brummer, is States and their Nationals Abroad: Support, Co-Opt and Repress (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Ganguly’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

 

Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers," and several other publications have named her one of the country’s most influential women. Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award (2017). In 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship (an alliance of more than 50 national non-profit organizations) selected Strossen for its Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.

When Strossen stepped down as ACLU President, three ideologically diverse Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell/tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter.

She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (2023). She is also the host and project consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series on free speech that was released on public television in 2023, and now available on YouTube.

Her book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was named a New York Times “notable book” of 1995 and was republished in 2024 as part of the New York University Press “Classic” series. Her book HATE was selected as the “Common Read” by Washington University and Washburn University.

Strossen has made thousands of public presentations before diverse audiences around the world, including on more than 500 different campuses and in many foreign countries, and she has appeared on virtually every national television news program. Her hundreds of publications have appeared in many scholarly and general interest publications.

Strossen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before becoming a law professor, she practiced law in her home town of Minneapolis and in New York City. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Professor Strossen’s Athenaeum program is the Salvatori Center's 2025-26 Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism and is also co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.