DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE STROBE TALBOTT TO SPEAK AT PITT Event honors retirement of Professor Dennison Rusinow

PITTSBURGH, April 14 -- Strobe Talbott, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, will discuss "The Balkan Challenge: Reflections on Nationalism and Conflicts," at the University of Pittsburgh, at 3 p.m., Thursday, April 20, in the Frick Fine Arts Building Auditorium in Oakland.

The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow.

Talbott is visiting Pitt in honor of the retirement of Dennison Rusinow, research professor at the University Center for International Studies and adjunct professor in the history department.

The event is sponsored by Pitt's Center for Russian and East European Studies, the University Center for International Studies and the Department of History.

Talbott has served as Deputy Secretary of State since February 23, 1994. He assumed that post after serving for a year as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States (NIS).

Talbott entered government after 21 years as a journalist for Time Magazine. His last position there was as the magazine's Editor-at-Large and foreign affairs columnist. Prior to that, he was Washington bureau chief for five years. His earlier assignments for Time were as a diplomatic correspondent, White House correspondent, State Department correspondent, and Eastern Europe correspondent.

Talbott is the author of several books on diplomacy and U.S. - Soviet relations. He translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, published in 1970 and 1974, and twice won the Edward Weintal Prize for distinguished reporting on foreign affairs and diplomacy.

Talbott served as a trustee of Yale University and the Hotchkiss School and as a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Aspen Strategy Group. A native of Dayton, Ohio, he was educated at Hotchkiss and Yale. After graduation, he spent three years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Rusinow joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in September, 1988. Prior to that, he reported on current affairs in East Central and Balkan Europe for the American Universities Field Staff (later the Universities Field Staff International) from Belgrade, Zagreb, and Vienna from 1963 to 1988.

A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1952 to 1954, Rusinow holds a B.A. from Duke University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford, where he also was a temporary lecturer in politics and modern European history at New College. In addition to some 76 AUFS/UFSI Reports published between 1963 and 1991, Rusinow is the author of The Yugoslav Experiment, Italy's Austrian Heritage, and numerous contributions to collective works, journals, and newspapers.

He has three times served as academic dean for Pitt's Semester at Sea program. Since moving to Pittsburgh, he has continued to make prolonged annual or more frequent visits to East Central and Balkan Europe, with particular attention to disintegrating and now former Yugoslavia, and to study and write about problems of nationalism in that region and in general.

For more information about this event, call 412-648-7407.

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