NEWS
NORMAN, OKLA. – The University of Oklahoma has announced three distinguished speakers who will visit its Norman campus during the 2025-2026 academic year. OU will host Akhil Reed Amar and Anne Applebaum for its Presidential Speakers Series dinners in the fall and spring, respectively. Wilfred M. McClay will present a keynote at the university’s annual Free Speech Week in October.
“We are excited to welcome these academic leaders in politics and history to Oklahoma,” said OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. “Our university community is strengthened when we engage with unique, informed perspectives, and the knowledge these experts possess is critical to understanding some of the biggest national and global conversations happening today.”
Fall 2025 Presidential Speakers Series Dinner: Akhil Reed Amar
6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025
Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, 2401 Chautauqua Ave., Norman
Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and author of Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920 will present “The Constitution and the Presidency.”
Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar’s work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in over 50 cases — the most citations among living scholars under age 70. He was an informal consultant to the popular TV show The West Wing, and his scholarship has been showcased on many broadcasts, including The Colbert Report, Morning Joe, AC360, Fox News and Erin Burnett OutFront.
He is the author of more than 100 law review articles and several books. The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, came out in May 2021 and its sequel, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, is being published September 2025. Amar also has a weekly podcast, “Amarica’s Constitution.”
Spring 2026 Presidential Speakers Series Dinner: Anne Applebaum
6 p.m. Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Oklahoma Memorial Union Ballroom, 900 Asp Ave., Norman
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist and commentator Anne Applebaum will present the moderated conversation “Geopolitical Risk: Regionally and Globally.”
Informed by her expertise in Europe and her years of international reporting, Applebaum shares perspectives on – and the far-reaching implications of – volatile current world events. As technology offers authoritarian governments a new scale of media manipulation and changes the tenor of political discourse, she scrutinizes the misinformation, propaganda and criminal exploitation that influence global affairs.
Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History (2003) is about the Soviet concentration camps. Her book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine won her second Duff Cooper Prize and the 28th annual Lionel Gelber Prize in 2018. Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (2023) was a New York Times bestseller and recognized as a “Best Book of the Year” by multiple publications.
She is a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She is also a staff writer at The Atlantic and has been a contributor to Foreign Affairs, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.
Fall 2025 Free Speech Week Keynote: Wilfred M. McClay
1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025
Oklahoma Memorial Union, Associates Room, 900 Asp Ave., Norman
Hillsdale College professor and author Wilfred M. McClay will present “Speech as a Middle Ground.”
McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. Before coming to Hillsdale in the fall of 2021, he was the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. His book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, received the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history.
He served for 11 years on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently a member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, and served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Rome.
Event Reservations
Limited seating for the fall events is available to OU students, faculty, staff and alumni by reservation. Overflow seating will be available to the public. For reservations, more information and accommodations, email universityevents@ou.edu or call (405) 325-1701. RSVP information for the Presidential Speakers Series Dinner with Anne Applebaum will be available in spring 2026.
More information about the events is available at ou.edu/president/speakerseries and ou.edu/freespeechweek.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information about the university, visit www.ou.edu.
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