Manu Karuka is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College and author of the book Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, which was released in March of this year. Karuka was a double-degree Oberlin student who graduated in 2000 with majors in Composition in the Conservatory and South Asian Studies in the College. After Oberlin, Karuka earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. Karuka delivered a talk at Oberlin about...

Susan Orlean is an award-winning, bestselling author and journalist. Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992 and has contributed to publications including The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, among others. In October 2018, she published The Library Book, which tells the story of the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library Fire that destroyed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. She interweaves this story with the history of the American public library system, as we...

Chief Clarence “Ryan” Warfield is the recently appointed city of Oberlin Chief of Police. A native of northeast Ohio, Warfield, a former sergeant from the city of Elyria, brings an impressive skill set to the position including specialties in interrogation, voice analysis, body language study, youth violence training, and death scene investigative skills. He also served as a police academy instructor in the martial art of Krav Maga and worked with the Lorain County Drug Task Force. Although ...

Gar Alperovitz came to Oberlin as one of the speakers in The State of American Democracy: A National Conversation, a three-day, non-partisan discussion about the state of democracy in the U.S. The conference examines how the U.S. ended up in its current polarized state, and how we can bolster the resilience, fairness, and stability of our democratic institutions. Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and former government official. He was the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of...