Best-selling author Sylvia Nasar will deliver the School of Business Administration's 22nd Gorlin Memorial Lecture on Monday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m., in the Varner Recital Hall.
The first John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, Nasar is known for the elegance of her prose and her megabestseller, A Beautiful Mind. A former economic correspondent for The New York Times, she also is the author of Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius in Modern Times, which has received rave reviews following its release in September 2011.
In her lecture, titled Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, she will discuss her current book of the same name. In Grand Pursuit, Nasar traces the making of the field of modern economics -- from Victorian England to modern-day India -- and shows how the big economic ideas have allowed mankind to transcend the deprivation and misery of the not too distant past. She presents the development of a revolution in human thinking that was unimaginable 200 years ago -- the notion that the bottom nine-tenths of humanity could escape the age-old sentence of endless poverty and a life of drudgery, that nations could shape their own destinies.
The Gorlin Lecture is free and open to the public, but please reserve a spot. To reserve your spot, contact Stacey Frankovich at frankovi@oakland.edu. OU students, faculty and board members do not need to register to attend.
About the Speaker
Nasar co-directs the M.A. program in business journalism for the Columbia Journalism School. In her illustrious career, she has worked as an economics correspondent for the New York Times, as a staff writer at Fortune, and as a columnist for U.S. News and World Report. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals including The New Yorker magazine and Newsweek. She has held visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton University), and at Kings and Churchill Colleges (Cambridge University). She holds a B.A. in literature from Antioch College and an M.A. in economics from New York University.
Her earlier best seller – A Beautiful Mind – tells the remarkable story of John Nash, the Princeton mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia for three decades before recovering and winning a Nobel Prize in economics. Her biography won the National Book Critics Circle Award and helped put a human face on a devastating mental illness. Published in 30 languages, the book inspired the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.
About the Gorlin Lecture
Alice Conner Gorlin was an esteemed professor of economics at Oakland University from 1972 until her death in 1987. She gained international recognition as a scholar of the Soviet economy. Dr. Gorlin's dedication to the role of human beings as citizens of the world led her family and friends to establish this memorial lecture series to promote understanding of international issues and events. For more information, visit the website at www.oakland.edu/gorlinlecture.