Fall 2026 Lectures
LOCATION
Fall lectures will be held in-person at OLLI: 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW in Room A on the first floor. Lectures are on Fridays from 1:30-2:30 PM.
Registration
Registration is required to attend in-person lectures and will open at 10:00 AM on the Friday prior to each in-person lecture. Registration is via an event on the OLLI website events calendar. The direct registration link will be included in the Friday newsletter the week prior to each lecture. Lectures are free and open to the public, but you must have an OLLI account to register. If you do not have one, you can create an account when going to register. Each registrant may reserve up to two seats, and all attendees must be listed on the registration. To guarantee your seat, please arrive and be seated at least five minutes before the lecture begins.
Lectures
Bob Blaemire, Unforced Errors: 15 Bad Decisions That Changed American History
Friday, October 2
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Robert Blaemire has been active in politics throughout his adult life. He began his career in 1967 working for Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), eventually serving as his Office Manager and Executive Assistant. During his 13 years with Bayh, Bob also worked on several political campaigns and earned degrees in Political Science and Legislative Affairs from George Washington University.
He later founded Blaemire Communications, a political computer services firm that served Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations across the country. The company developed Leverage, an online voter-file management system, and was acquired by Catalist in 2007. Bob remained with Catalist until 2016, when he turned his attention to consulting and writing. He is the author of three books, including, The Athlete, his first novel, a biography of Birch Bayh, and his most recent book, Unforced Errors: 15 Bad Decisions That Changed American History. In 2022, he served as a Fellow at the University of Kansas’s Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics.
Bob's book, Unforced Errors: 15 Bad Decisions That Changed American History, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture.
Dennis Ross, The Iran War & the Failure of Statecraft
Friday, October 9
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Ambassador Dennis Ross is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He also teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. For more than twelve years, Amb. Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
He served two and half years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, spending the first 6 months of the Administration as the special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. His newest book is Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, March 2025).
Dennis' book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture.
Peter Buck Feller, The Last Gasp of William Schwartzfeller: Soviet Espionage and the Cruelties of Stalin’s Gulags
Friday, October 16
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Peter Buck Feller is a retired international trade lawyer with extensive publishing in his field, including his authoritative treatise, US Customs and International Trade Law Guide. In addition, he wrote an article reviewing the emerging nonfiction genre of books by children of spies, published in Foreign Policy (2012) magazine and an article on hunger strikes, published in The Pennsylvania Gazette (2024).
Feller is an independent historian with a particular interest in Soviet espionage around the Second World War and Stalinist system of gulags. He earned an A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania, a J.D. from The American University, Washington College of Law, and an L.L.M. from the George Washington University Law Center.
Peter's book, The Last Gasp of William Schwartzfeller: Soviet Espionage and the Cruelties of Stalin’s Gulags, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture.
Jim Johnston, Maryland’s Gift to the Nation: A Capital City
Friday, October 23
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Major cities have founding myths. Washington, D.C., too, has its myth: that a worthless swamp was chosen for the capital because it was near George Washington’s Mount Vernon. In fact, the District of Columbia was selected as a compromise between northern and southern states and because Georgetown was expected to become a major commercial hub and gateway to the interior. The vision was not a swampy wasteland but a stunning federal city, modeled on Versailles and supplied with abundant fresh water.
Jim Johnston is a retired lawyer and an active writer and lecturer in Bethesda. His law practice covered telecommunications, intellectual property, and appellate litigation. Jim has more than 120 newspaper and magazine articles to his credit on topics such as law, history, art, terrorism, and books. He has written four books: From Slave Ship to Harvard, Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family; Murder, Inc., The CIA under John F. Kennedy; The War Story of Harold Johnston; and The Recollections of Margaret Loughborough, A Southern Woman’s Memories of Richmond, VA, and Washington, DC, during the Civil War.
Carla Dirlikov Canales, Cultural Diplomacy: Using the Arts to Create Positive Social Impact
Friday, October 30
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Carla Canales has been praised by Opera Magazine for possessing a voice that “grabs the heartstrings with its dramatic force and musicality.” She has won acclaim on leading stages around the world as a performer while also being recognized as a thought leader, advocate, and entrepreneur. Most recently, Carla served the Biden Administration in a newly created position at the National Endowment for the Arts and later at the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, as Senior Advisor and Envoy for Cultural Exchange. Through this role, she created and spearheaded the Artists for Understanding initiative.
Carla currently serves as a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Through this role she has taught for the Public Leadership Co-Curricular Program since 2022. Carla is a published author, having written op-eds for USA Today and for the New York Times, as well as book chapter contributions for several academic
Scott Seligman, The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools
Friday, November 6
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning author of narrative non-fiction with a special interest in the history and biography of hyphenated Americans. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton University and a master's degree from Harvard University.
Fluent in Mandarin, he lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China for eight years and reads and writes Chinese. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, managed a multinational public relations agency in Beijing, served as spokesperson and communications director of a Fortune 50 company and taught English in Taiwan and Chinese in Washington, DC.
Scott's book, The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle Over Christianity in the Public Schools, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture.
Nicholas Reynolds, Reflecting on the Shadow War in Occupied France through the Eyes of a Magnificent Soldier of Fortune
Friday, November 13
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Nicholas Reynolds has worked in the field of modern history off and on for 40 years, with some unusual detours. Freshly minted PhD from Oxford University in hand, he joined the Marine Corps in the 1970s, serving as an infantry officer and then as an official historian. As a colonel in the Reserves, he was Officer in Charge of Field History, deploying historians around the world to capture history as it was being made.
For many years, he worked at CIA, most recently as the historian for the CIA Museum, where he drafted the strategic plan for the next decade and wrote a foundational monograph as well as shorter pieces and many labels. He still believes he has held the best two niche jobs in the US Government. Leveraging his experience, he has taught at the Naval War College, Johns Hopkins University, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Nicholas' book, Ortiz's War: The Allies' Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture.
Barry Lynn, Monopolies and Oligarchs
Friday, November 20
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Barry C. Lynn is Executive Director of the Open Markets Institute. Over the last two decades, Lynn pioneered understanding of how the monopolies of the 21st century threaten our democracy, individual liberties, security, and prosperity. Lynn’s efforts to update antimonopoly law and thinking for the digital era were fully embraced by the Biden Administration and the European Commission and largely embraced by the Trump Administration.
His warnings on structural flaws in international systems predicted today’s supply chain crises, and his proposed solutions, have shaped strategy and policy in the U.S. government, Europe, Asia, the IMF, and the OECD. Lynn developed his thinking in three books - End of the Line (2005), Cornered (2010), and Liberty from All Masters (2020), as well as numerous articles, speeches, and Congressional testimony.
Rebecca Hamilton, White Collar Criminals
Friday, December 4
1:30-2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at Washington College of Law and Execute Editor at Just Security. She was American University’s 2025 Scholar/Teacher of the Year, a 2024 U.S. Fulbright Scholar, a 2020 Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, and a 2019 Pulitzer Center grantee. Her current book project, White Collar War Criminals, recounts the multi-decade struggle to hold the corporate enablers of atrocities to account. A first-generation graduate of the University of Sydney and Harvard Law School, her 2011 book, Fighting for Darfur: Public action and the struggle to stop genocide, examines the impact of citizen activism on policymaking in the face of unfolding atrocities.
Her scholarship, published in the Yale, Harvard, and Columbia journals of international law, focuses on the structural factors underlying international crimes. Previously, Hamilton served in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court. Prior to academia she was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and a legal correspondent for Reuters.
OLLI does not endorse any of the viewpoints expressed by the speakers in its series.
We thank the Lecture Committee and all those who suggested and contacted speakers: Ellen Babby, Joe Belden, Tamara Belden, Helen Blank, Jim Blasiak, Edward Cohen, David Flaxman (Co-Chair), Lisa Harper (Co-Chair), Jeanne Kent, Lynn Lewis, Annabel McClure (staff), Irvin Nathan, Marc Pearl, and Paul Vamvas.