Featured
Ron Christie is Founder and CEO of Christie Strategies LLC, a full-service communications and issues management firm in Washington, D.C. Christie is also the author of three books. His most recent title, Blackwards: How Black Leadership is Returning America to the Days of Separate But Equal was published in September 2012. His two previous books were Acting White: The Birth and Death of a Racial Slur (2010, St. Martin’s Press) and Black in the White House (2006, Thomas Nelson/Nelson Current). Christie served as a Resident Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government Institute of Politics for the Fall 2011 term at Harvard University. He served as an Inaugural Resident Fellow at the University of Southern California (USC) Center for the Political Future for the Fall 2019 semester. In 2020 Christie was appointed as a Senior Practitioner Fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Additionally, he serves as a member of the Board of Counselors for the Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, chaired by former MD Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).
Christie serves as an Adjunct Professor at the McCourt Graduate School of Public Policy and the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. In August 2015 he was named to the Board of Advisors for the inaugural Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service. He also teaches as a Lecturer at New York University’s Washington D.C. campus where he leads a course entitled “Private Influence in Public Policy” during the Spring Semester. He teaches “The American Presidency” during the Fall Semester. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the John Brademas Center at New York University. In April 2018 he was asked by the Aspen Institute to moderate a two-day Socrates Seminar entitled: “Learning to Lead & The Role of Congress” for emerging thought leaders of color on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Christie, a veteran senior advisor of both the White House and the Congress, brings years of government relations experience. Most recently, Christie served as Vice President of Navigators LLC – a strategic consulting and communications firm. He previously served as Executive Vice President and Director of Global Government Affairs at Ruder Finn and Of Counsel at the DC law firm of Patton Boggs, LLP. From 2002 to 2004, he was Acting Director of USA Freedom Corps and special assistant to President George W. Bush. He began service at the White House in 2001 as deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney for domestic policy, advising the Vice President on policy initiatives in health care, budget, tax and other policy areas.
Prior to joining the Vice President’s staff, he briefly served as counsel to U.S. Senator George Allen (R-VA). He also served as senior advisor to former House Budget Committee Chairman and former Ohio Governor John Kasich from 1992 – 1999. Christie is a Co-Founder of No Labels – a groundbreaking movement led by Americans who embrace the new politics of problem-solving and are collaborating to find commonsense, non-partisan solutions to America’s toughest challenges. www.nolabels.org
A frequent commentator on current political events, Christie serves as a political analyst for BBC World in North America – a position he has held since 2014. He first appeared on their global 2012 election night coverage and reprised this role to cover 2014.
Past Events
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum, History, Language & Global Culture and Communication, Journalism, & Media Departments, and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program present:
Barbara Abrams, Ph.D., author of the new book, ReSisters: Forensic Storytelling and the Literary Roots of Early Modern Feminism, and Laura Levitt, Ph.D., author of The Objects That Remain, join in a conversation about women’s stories of trauma and transcendence. This talk weaves together several stories of survival both chronologically and thematically and emphasizes the significance of the use of objects in women’s storytelling, from 18th Century France to the Holocaust, to the present. The afternoon’s moderator is Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Ph.D., chair and associate professor, Communication, Journalism & Media Department, Suffolk University.
Barbara Abrams is Chair and Professor in the History, Language, & Global Culture Department at Suffolk University. Her academic work focuses on French literature of the Enlightenment, Women’s, and Gender Studies, and Global and Cultural Studies. She is the author of numerous books, including Reframing Rousseau’s Le Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity and Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France.
Laura Levitt is Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender at Temple University where she has chaired the Religion Department and directed both the Jewish Studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Programs. She is currently the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion at Carleton College. Levitt is the author of The Objects that Remain (2020); American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007); and Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997) and a co-editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust (2003); and Judaism Since Gender (1997).
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Sargent Hall, 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Room 235, Second Floor
12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
In-person and live via ZOOM
Lunch will be provided.
This program is free and open to the public.
Past Events
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum and Theatre Department, Front Porch Arts Collective, and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project present:
Reimagining Shakespeare through the Black Lens
Join us for a spirited conversation with Stevie Walker-Webb acclaimed Tony-nominated director of Ain’t No Mo’, actor, playwright, activist, and director of the play Fat Ham, Dawn M. Simmons, Associate Director of Fat Ham and Co-Producing Director of Front Porch Arts Collective, and Regine Vital, theatre artist, educator, and Actors’ Shakespeare Project Associate Producer. The evening’s moderator is Pascale Florestal, Director of Education, Front Porch Arts Collective, and Visiting Guest Artist Professor in Practice, Suffolk University.
The evening’s panel will discuss the evolution of Shakespeare’s work and how race and other intersections influence these stories and reflect on the world today. The panel will explore fresh new perspectives and distinct voices offered in two upcoming Boston theater productions, Fat Ham and The Taming of the Shrew.
Fat Ham, a Huntington Theatre production in partnership with Front Porch Art Collective and Alliance Theater, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning new play that is a smart and sharp reinvention of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, which took Broadway by storm this spring.
In The Taming of the Shrew, premiering at the Modern Theatre this fall, Artistic Director Christopher Edwards and the talented cast turn this beloved play inside out, flip it upside down and stretch it to the limits in a way that only Actors’ Shakespeare Project can – to find what truly sits at the heart of this hilarious and contentious comedy. Audience Q&A will follow this moderated conversation.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
6:00 p.m.
Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre
525 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111
This event is free and open to the public.
Register here to attend in person
Register here to attend via Zoom
Click here for the PDF Flyer
Graphic Designer Credit: Ginny Warren Design
Samuel J. Abrams is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on questions of related civic and political culture and American ideologies. He is concurrently a professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College, and a faculty fellow with New York University’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research.
Dr. Abrams has been widely published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Interest, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He is the author of several books on a variety of topics including public opinion, Congress, religion and society, and polarization. His scholarly articles have been featured in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, The Jewish Journal, and PS: Political Science & Politics. He is presently working on two book projects exploring partisanship, polarization, and society.
Dr. Abrams has an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and is an alumnus of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Program on Inequality and Social Policy. He received his A.B. in political science and sociology from Stanford University.
Hugo Salcedo Larios holds a doctorate in Philology from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain. He completed a postgraduate degree in “Theory and Criticism of Theater” at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Additionally, he holds a degree in Intercultural Theology from the Universidad Iberoamericana.
Salcedo is an essayist and playwright who was awarded the prestigious Tirso de Molina International Award from Spain in 1989 for his play El viaje de los cantores “The Troubadours’ Journey”. The play was performed by the National Theater Company of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) and toured through several cities in Mexico and Spain. This play also won the Best Author Award from the Association of Mexican Theater Critics and Chroniclers. He received the ASSITEJ-Spain International Prize for Stage Research for Children and Youth in 2019, for his work Migration in theater for children and youth in Mexico (Madrid, ASSITEJ, 2020). Some of his dramatic pieces have been translated, broadcast on radio, and published, or performed in English, French, German, Persian, Korean, Czech, Italian, and Hungarian.
He received the “Coat of Arms Order” from Guarenas, Venezuela in 2006. In 2012 The University of Tennessee and the Espacio 1900 Cultural Center dedicated the “International Conference on Latin American Theater” solely to his dramaturgy. That same year the Tijuana Cultural Center paid tribute to him, replicating it in 2020. He also received the National Recognition from the Mexican Association of Theater Research (AMIT) in the category of Academic Research, in 2013; and in 2014 as “University Creator” by the same AMIT. In 2015 he obtained the “Theatrical Merit Award” from the Secretary of Culture of the Government of Jalisco; that same year the Institute of Art and Culture of Tijuana (IMAC) recognized him for the 25th anniversary of his play El viaje de los cantores (1990 – 2015), considered as an “emblematic Mexican play”. The University of Guadalajara has launched in his name the biennial Call for the “Hugo Salcedo National Prize for University Dramaturgy” in recognition of his academic and creative career.
He was a member of the National System of Art Creators of the Culture and the Arts of Mexico Fundo. He is currently a member of the National System of Researchers of the National Council for Science and Technology. He is a full-time academic in the Department of Letters of the Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City. This University awarded him the 2018 FICSAC Award for excellence in academic research, a prize that he obtained again in 2020 and 2021.
