GREENSBORO, N.C. -- From massacres in Rwanda to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Sunni/Shiite violence in Iraq, genocide has been a staple of recent global politics.
Now, one of the foremost experts on Holocaust studies and genocide, James E. Waller, will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 1, in Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel at Greensboro College on "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing."
His award-winning book of the same name was published in 2002 and significantly updated in 2007 to reflect post-9/11 developments. Waller uses evolutionary psychology and the 20th century's genocides to show how ordinary people can become mass murderers.
Waller is an affiliated scholar with the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. He has held international visiting professorships at the Technical University in Berlin and the Catholic University in Eichstatt, Germany, and has taught at Whitworth University and the University of Vermont. He has been awarded summer fellowships with the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University and with the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Waller's speech is the second installment in the three-year Karl Schleunes Lecture Series at Greensboro College. The series is named in honor of Karl A. Schleunes, a Holocaust scholar at UNC-Greensboro and author of Legislating the Holocaust. It is funded by Richard Levy, a former Greensboro College trustee who also funded the Levy-Lowenstein Holocaust Collection in the college's James Addison Jones Library.
Greensboro College is primarily an undergraduate college, also offering four master's degrees. Coeducational and independent, the institution is located near downtown Greensboro. It was founded in 1838 and is affiliated with the United Methodist Church.
The college enrolls about 1,260 students from about 30 states, the District of Columbia and 21 nations. The school features a strong liberal-arts program and a 16-sport athletic program.
Media Contact:
Lex Alexander, Director of External Relations, lex.alexander@greensborocollege.edu
www.greensborocollege.edu
