Rising to the Challenge: Leading Beyond the Crisis

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Around the world 2020 has placed questions of leadership squarely in the spotlight.

As the year draws to a close, we continue to look for leaders able to move us through the coronavirus pandemic and the social, political and environmental challenges that face us as we seek to build back better.

If we aren’t satisfied with the leaders we have, what kind of leaders do we need?

What kind of leadership can engage the challenges of our time?

What are the personal implications for current leaders and the leaders of tomorrow?

Join us for an Oxford-wide leadership discussion with post-election perspectives from three eminent American contributors:

David Brooks of the New York Times

Dr Elizabeth Kiss, Warden of Rhodes House

Dr Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Professor of American Art and Senior Historian at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The event will be hosted by Dr Edward Brooks, Executive Director of the Oxford Character Project.

To sign up for the event please REGISTER HERE. The event will also be live streamed to this website via YouTube.

David Brooks is one of America’s foremost social commentators, well known around the world for his op-ed column in the New York Times and succession of bestselling books, including: The Second Mountain, The Road to Character and The Social Animal. David has written recently in The Atlantic on the crisis of social trust and joins clear-eyed analysis of the challenges that face us with proposals as to how society might be renewed, which he seeks to advance through the Aspen Institute, where David is Executive Director of The Social Fabric Project.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Senior Historian and Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and joined the NPG in 2019 after serving as a faculty member at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, where she still holds an appointment in the History of Art department. She is the author of numerous publications on the art and culture of the United States, with an emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Elizabeth Kiss is Warden of Rhodes House, leading the global Rhodes community and its many initiatives around the world to develop leaders of tomorrow. Before coming to Oxford she served for twelve years as president of Agnes Scott College, Georgia, and prior to that as the founding director of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, building a university wide interdisciplinary centre focused on promoting moral reflection and commitment in personal, professional, organizational and civic life. Her academic focus has been on moral and political philosophy and she has published on moral education, human rights, ethnic conflict and nationalism, feminist theory, and transitional justice.