A devised new work, conceived and directed by Lesley Ferris (left), co-directed by Jeanine Thompson, with the MFA actors and designers. During the centenary of the USA's 1917 entry into World War I, the Department of Theatre marks this occasion by creating a new work employing verbatim theatre. The source material is drawn from archives, contemporary documents, letters, memoirs, commissioned art, and popular music with a focus on Britain and France and their famous Somme Offensive, the largest battle on the Western Front. Supported with a grant from the Mershon Center. Read more at go.osu.edu/forbiddenzones

Petra Goedde is associate professor of history at Temple University and associate director of its Center for the Humanities. She is the author of GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (Yale, 2003), co-editor of The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford, 2012), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, 2013). In this event, Goedde explores the politics of peace by examining the 1967 Report from Iron Mountain, which purported to be a leaked government document arguing that perpetual war is necessary for governments to remain in power. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/goeddep

This creative project is a "live art" event to mark the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I. More than 20 uniformed men and women (as nurses and ambulance drivers) will march into position at Thompson Library, Wexner Center for the Arts, and The Oval, stand or sit silently before moving to the next site. As they move they will sing "We're here because we're here," sung by British soldiers as they went into the Battle of the Somme, the deadliest battle of the war. Each student will have "business cards" with name, rank, military unit, date of death, and age. They will silently hand the cards to the audience. Thus, the students will inhabit the roles of an actual man or woman who took part in the war and in many cases, died as a result. This event is being held in conjunction with the production of "Forbidden Zones: The Great War," conceived and directed by Lesley Ferris. Read more at go.osu.edu/silentsoldiers

Peter Rosendorff is professor of politics at New York University and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Economics and Politics. His research examines the linkages between domestic politics and international economic policy, cooperation and law, with applications to human rights, terrorism, international trade and investment, and democratization. In this event, Rosendorff examines the role of transparency in democratic equilibrium, finding that it improves the functioning of elections, increases popular satisfaction with democracy, and inhibits challenges to the democratic order. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/rosendorffp

Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and founding co-editor of Journal of Democracy. During early 2004, he served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq. He has edited 36 books on democracy, including  How People View Democracy, How East Asians View Democracy, Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, and Assessing the Quality of Democracy. In this event, Diamond will review the trends in freedom and democracy over the last decade and explain why liberal democracy is now in danger in the one place where it was presumed to be stable: The West. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/diamondl

The public's ability to form attitudes and opinions that guide decisions to use military force is among the most important duties of citizens of democratic nations. Yet most voters have virtually no direct exposure to warfare. Americans receive essentially all of their information about war through the lens of the national media. Media norms and practices about the coverage of war have changed dramatically over the past century, ranging from the "yellow journalism" of the turn of the 20th century, through the "golden age" of television journalism of towering figures like Walter Cronkite, to the splintered and partisan media environment of the internet. In this conference we will explore the evolution of these media norms and practices as well as their impact on how the public thinks and feels about war. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/warandmedia

This year we will be honoring McGraw-Hill Education as the International Company of the Year and Central Ohio students participating in the Global Scholars Diploma. McGraw-Hill's vision is to unlock the full potential of each learner. Their mission is to accelerate learning through intuitive, engaging, efficient and effective experiences grounded in research. McGraw-Hill has evolved their business from a print-centric producer of textbooks and instructional materials to a leader in the development of digital content and technology-enabled adaptive learning solutions delivered anywhere, anytime. McGraw-Hill distributes their products in over 135 countries across Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, Latin America and the Middle East. Read more and register

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell is the story of a most unusual traitor -- a signals analyst named Brian Regan who came close to pulling off one of the most audacious espionage plots in U.S. history. In the 90s, Regan stole thousands of satellite images and other documents from the National Reconnaissance Office and buried them in two state parks outside Washington, D.C. Although his attempt to sell these secrets to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi was unsuccessful, investigators had to spend two years looking for the secrets he had stolen. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a contributing writer at National Geographic whose features and essays on espionage, cybercrime, science and medicine have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired and other U.S. magazines. He has a master's in journalism from The Ohio State University.

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and was until 2004 the master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He was also awarded the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in recognition of his work on welfare economics in February 2015. In this lecture, Sen will examine three reasons why inequality is socially unreasonable.  Read more and register

The Oxford English Dictionary has named "post-truth" the word of 2016. Post-truth is defined as, "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Our panel hopes to look at different historical contexts/cases where generally accepted "truths" were somehow rendered unimportant, whether deliberately or unintentionally, thereby providing historical context for our more recent "post-truth" moments. Panelists include John Brooke, Department of History (left); Greg Anderson, History;  Melissa Curley, Comparative Studies; and Bert Harrill,  History.  Read more

Karen Seto is professor of geography and urbanization science at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University. Her talk will draw on recent research that examines the implications of future urban expansion on global croplands and energy demand by buildings. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, Seto finds that energy use for heating and cooling by mid-century will increase 5 to 40 percent over the 2010 estimate. The results also show that urban expansion will result in a 1.8 to 2.4 percent loss of global croplands by 2030, with substantial regional disparities. About 80 percent of global cropland loss from urban expansion will take place in Asia and Africa, where much of the cropland that will be lost is more than twice as productive as national averages. Read more