Aung San Suu Kyi to Deliver Godkin Lecture at Harvard Kennedy School

CAMBRIDGE MA — Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi will deliver the annual Godkin Lecture at Harvard Kennedy School on September 27th. The event will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge.

VOA’s Scott Stearns interviews Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi at VOA in Washington D.C., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. (VOA/A. Klein)




Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust will introduce the speaker. The event will be moderated by Kennedy School Dean David T. Ellwood.

Suu Kyi was elected in 2012 to the lower house of the Burmese Parliament less than two years after being released from house arrest where she had spent 15 of the previous 21 years. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, Suu Kyi became one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners. She now serves as Chair of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in which role she continues to fight for political reform in Burma.

The Edwin L. Godkin Lecture was established in 1903 to focus on the essentials of free government and the duties of the citizen. The lectureship was founded by friends of Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831–1902), editor and founder of The Nation. Previous lecturers have included Kofi Annan, C. Everett Koop, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Antonin Scalia, Thomas Schelling, and Adlai Stevenson.




This Forum event will be ticketed. Tickets will be distributed via an online lottery accessible on the Institute of Politics (IOP) website: http://forum.iop.harvard.edu/content/ticketed-event-public-address-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi. The event will also be web-streamed live on the Forum site.

Journalists interested in covering the Forum should contact the Kennedy School Communications Office at (617) 495-1115 to reserve space on the press riser.

A live Vivex video/audio feed of this Forum is available.

To view this and other events after their conclusion, visit the Forum archive: forum.iop.harvard.edu/past-forums/all/all/all.