The 18^th Annual Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture will take place Friday, September 30, 2016 at Florida International University, 11200 Southwest Eighth Street, Miami, Florida, at the university’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center at 6:30pm. The Honorable Bharrat Jagdeo, former President of Guyana, will address “The Caribbean and American Presidential Power: A Donald Trump Ascendancy.” The lecture is open to the public and admission is free; there will be a reception prior to and following the lecture.

Description: With the US elections in full swing, the world has its eyes on America. This year’s election has proven to be controversial on many levels with Donald Trump being the center of many debates and controversy. A former president himself, Jagdeo will address the election, presidential power and Donald Trump.

Bharrat Jagdeo was born in Guyana and has been active in its political life since the age of 13. Since graduating with a Master’s Degree in Economics from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in 1990, he has held several high-level governmental positions, ranging from Minister of Finance to President of Guyana from 1999-2011. Jagdeo has also held a number of global leadership positions in the areas of sustainable development, green growth and climate change. In 2008, he was named Time Magazine’s ‘Hero of the Environment’ and in 2010, the United Nations declared him to be one of its ‘Champions of the Earth Awardees.’ Mr. Jagdeo has also served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the IMF and World Bank Group in the past. He is currently his country’s Leader of the Opposition.

Established in 1999, the lecture series honors the distinguished Caribbean statesman Eric E. Williams, first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and Head of Government for a quarter of a century until his death in 1981.  He led the country to Independence from Britain in 1962 and onto Republicanism in 1976. He was the author of several books including his seminal work, Capitalism & Slavery, which re-framed the historiography of the British trans-Atlantic slave trade and, it could be argued, its concomitant European incarnations. [. . .]

The Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture is co-sponsored by:  The Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs; Ruth K. and Shepard Broad Distinguished Lecture Series; Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center.

The Lecture is also supported by The Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum (EWMC) at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago campus), which was inaugurated by former U.S. Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell in 1998.  It was named to UNESCO’s prestigious Memory of the World Register in 1999.

For more information on the Eric Williams Memorial Collection, please contact Erica Williams Connell at 305-905-9999 or email: ewmc@ewmc-tt.org.  For information about the lecture on September 30 at FIU, call 305-348-4156.