Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-2019, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014, Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Ikenberry is the author of eight books, most recently, A World Safe for Democracy:  Liberal Internationalism in the Making of Modern World Order (Yale, 2020), and Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order (Oxford, 2023). He is also author of After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001), and Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, 2011).

Professor Ikenberry will deliver the 2025-26 Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan.

Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer at The New Yorker who focusses on law, the courts, and the rule of law under President Trump. She joined The New Yorker after a 40-year career at the Washington Post, where, most recently, she was an associate editor and an opinion columnist. During her time at the Post, from where she resigned in protest in spring 2025, she covered the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Justice Department; served as deputy national editor; and was a deputy editor overseeing the op-ed section. She was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. 

Marcus holds a B.A. from Yale College, where she wrote for the Yale Daily News, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

(Excerpted from the New Yorker Magazine)

Jane Naomi Iwamura is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of the West. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Asian American religions, race, and popular culture in the United States, with a specialized emphasis on visual culture and Japanese American lived religions. She is the author of Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford, 2011) and co-editor of Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge, 2003). Her scholarship has appeared in journals, including American Quarterly and Amerasia Journal.

Iwamura co-founded the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), where she serves as a Co-PI and Project Director. She also sits on the National Editorial Board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 

Iwamura holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, bringing a rich background in philosophy, cultural studies, and religious history to her work.

Dr. Iwamura's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.

David Armitage is a prize-winning writer and teacher who has a worldwide reputation for his historical work. He is currently the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. 

Armitage has written extensively about the histories of Britain, the British Empire, and the United States, with a particular focus on the international and global trajectory of political ideas. His nineteen books as author or editor include The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2014), Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017) and, most relevant to the Athenaeum lecture, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007). He is currently working on a study of opera and international law.

Professor Armitage is the inaugural speaker for the Class of 1974 Speaker Series.

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. 

He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). 

His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. 

Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

Mr. Sze's Athenaeum reading is co-sponsored by the department of literature, the Salvatori Center, and the President's Leadership Funds.  

A historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide, Barry Trachtenberg is the author of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish (Rutgers, 2022), The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse, 2008). He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, Jacobin, and the Forward. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School.

He holds the Michael H. and Deborah Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.

Professor Trachtenberg’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American actor, writer, producer, fifth-generation storyteller, and the founder of Hakawati, a cultural organization exploring how narrative can transform trauma, perception, and civic imagination. Born to Syrian-Armenian immigrants and raised between the U.S. and Aleppo, her life changed in 2019 when she discovered a trunk of 180 hand-painted Karagöz shadow puppets created and carried through genocide by her great-great-grandfather, a hakawati (oral storyteller). The puppets—survivor objects and cross-cultural witnesses—collapsed lineage, history, and purpose, revealing a central insight that guides her work: that how we meet a story determines whether it calcifies into trauma or becomes a source of understanding and repair.

Tatoyan’s career spans theater, film, immersive media, and thought leadership. She has originated roles at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and A.C.T., and her screenwriting work has been supported by the Sundance Institute and the Dubai Film Connection. Her signature theatrical work, AZAD (the rabbit & the wolf) premiered in 2025 to extraordinary acclaim and hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “wondrous” and “shattering.”

A 2024–26 Georgetown Global Politics and Performance Lab Fellow, Tatoyan draws on a decade-long Vipassana meditation practice and a reframing of The 1001 Nights as a universal healing blueprint. Her work has been presented at Harvard, MIT, UCLA, the Brandenburg Gate Foundation, and beyond. Operating between Aleppo, Yerevan, and Los Angeles, she leads Hakawati as a lineage-rooted, globally resonant inquiry into how narrative can counter polarization and restore our capacity to see one another clearly.

Ms. Tatoyan’s Athenaeum program is the 2025-26 Mgrublian Annual Lecture on Armenian Studies and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. 

Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal P'12 is Distinguished Professor and holds the Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair in in the Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Business and Politics. He is the former Chair of the U.S. Consortium of APEC Study Centers. From 1991-1994, he was Chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies Program at UC Berkeley.

He has held fellowships from the Brookings Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, East-West Center, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was a Japan Foundation Abe Fellow. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the University of Geneva’s IOMBA program, INSEAD, Yonsei University, NTU Singapore, Bocconi University, Chung-Ang University, and the University of Hawaii. He is also an elected lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Aggarwal consults regularly with multinational corporations on strategy, trade policy, and international negotiations, and he has been a consultant to the Mexican government, Malaysian government, the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Defense Department, U.S. State Department, World Trade Organization, OECD, the Group of Thirty, FAO, IFAD, the International Labor Organization, ASEAN, and the World Bank. In 1990, he was Special Adviser on Trade Negotiations to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and has worked with the APEC Eminent Persons Group. In 1997, he won the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at the Haas School of Business for PhD teaching; in 2003 he was first runner up for the Cheit Award for MBA teaching and won first place for the MBA program in 2005.

His authored books include Liberal Protectionism, International Debt Threat, Debt Games, Le Renseignement Stratégique d'Entreprise, Une Nouvelle Approche des Phénomènes Sociaux, and he has edited or co-edited Institutional Designs for a Complex World, Asia-Pacific Crossroads, Winning in Asia: European Style, Winning in Asia: Japanese Style, Winning in Asia: U.S. Style, Sovereign Debt Management, European Union Trade Strategies, The Strategic Dynamics of Latin American Trade, Bilateral Trade Agreements in the Asia Pacific, Asia’s New Institutional Architecture, Northeast Asia: Ripe for Integration?, Trade Policy in the Asia-Pacific, Responding to a Resurgent Russia, Linking Trade and Security, Responding to China's Rise, and Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies. His most recent books are the Oxford Handbook of Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft, eds., Oxford 2025 (with Tai Ming Cheung); and Governing Growth: Industrial Policy from Hamilton to Trump, Oxford, in press (with Marco Di Tommaso). He has also published eight special journal issues and 140 articles and book chapters. His current research examines industrial policy and the political economy of high technology new economic statecraft. 

Aggarwal received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Born in Seattle, Washington, he speaks five languages.

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

Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences, Professor Emeritus of Economics, and Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs, joined Brown University in 2005. He is an academic economist who has made scholarly contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resource economics. He is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual, having published over 200 articles in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad on the issues of racial inequality and social policy.

Loury is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past Vice President of the American Economics Association. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic magazine.

Among the issues Loury studies are racial affirmative action; dysfunctional social identity; status transmission across generations; and cognitive theories of racial stigma. He also writes popular essays on social and political themes as a public intellectual.

Michael J. Fortner, Pamela B. Gann Associate Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, will moderate the conversation.

(Special Note: This event had originally been scheduled for Tuesday, February 24, 2026. We are honoring the head table sign-ups from that original date. Students who had secured a head table spot (or were waitlisted for the head table) will have the right of first refusal for the head table. If you had a confirmed spot at the head table, we are aware of who you are and we will contact you directly in early April.)