Speakers:
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, director of research at the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the lead editor of perhaps the most important historical text on global communism, The Black Book of Communism, which was originally published in French in 1997 and translated into English and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. As a young man during the French youth revolt of the late 1960s, Courtois was a Maoist militant; he has since become a globally renowned expert on and critic of communist totalitarianism. He is currently finishing a lengthy study of Lenin and Leninism.
Paul Hollander is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was born in Hungary under communist rule and fled in the wake of the Soviet invasion to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956. He went on to publish more than a dozen books on communist totalitarianism and ideology, including several that focused specifically on the flirtation of the Western intelligentsia with communist ideology. His most recent book is From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship.
Ronald Radosh is is Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of many books related to the history of communism, including Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, and a renowned study of the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, The Rosenberg File.
Respondents:
Prof. Jay Goodale, Bucknell University History Department
Prof. Paul Kengor, Grove City College Political Science Department
Prof. Alexander Tristan Riley, Bucknell University Sociology Department
Prof. James Shields, Bucknell University Comparative Humanities Program
Prof. Alfred Kentigern Siewers, Bucknell University English Department/Literary Studies Program
Prof. Catherine Wanner, The Pennsylvania State University Department of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies