James Hogg Professor of Liberal Arts From the University of Texas at Austin to Speak on Campus Next Tuesday

The Department of Political Science and Security Studies is pleased to announce that Kurt Weyland, PhD, will speak at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, April 30 in the Coulter Science Center Lecture Hall. Weyland is the James Hogg Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 23 years.

Weyland’s lecture titled “The Over-Use of Dramatic Political Terms: Causes and Downsides” will draw on concerns about the use of the term “fascism” as a descriptor. The presentation will broach the subject of “why democracy triumphs over populism,” which is the subject of Weyland’s forthcoming book.

Dr. Tobias Gibson, the Dr. John Langton Professor of Political Science at Westminster, says Weyland respectfully takes issue the deeply partisan language used in the current political environment. “Given the extreme rhetoric used in the current political ‘discourse,’ Professor Weyland’s talk comes at a crucial time in American politics,” Gibson explained.

After receiving a Staatsexamen from Johannes-Gutenberg Universitat Mainz in 1984, an MA from the University of Texas in 1986 and a PhD from Stanford University in 1991, Weyland taught for 10 years at Vanderbilt University before joining the faculty at the University of Texas in 2001. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, from 1999 to 2000 and at the Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, in 2004 to 2005. From 2001 to 2004, he served as associate editor of the Latin American Research Review.

Weyland’s research interests focus on democratization and authoritarian rule, social policy/policy diffusion and populism in Latin America and Europe. He is the author of numerous journal articles and books, including Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America Since the Revolutions of 1848, which was published in 2014.

This lecture is made possible by a Missouri Humanities grant shared between Westminster College and Lincoln University in Jefferson City.