Ithaca College

Shery WuDunn will be featured as the Peggy R. Williams Difficult Dialogue Symposium Speaker on Thursday, November 1, 2012 in Ford Hall at 7:30 pm.   Her book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, will be featured as a special presentation of Independent Lens on PBS on October 1 and 2, at 9pm.  For more information visit http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/half-the-sky.

Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive, entrepreneur and best-selling author. With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times), she has co-authored three best-selling books. The most recent is Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide which focuses on the challenges facing women and girls in developing countries and was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Colbert Report and other network television shows. WuDunn will discuss her book (which will be available for purchase at the bookstore this semester and at the event) and engage us in a difficult-to-digest-dialogue focused on such issues as forced prostitution and sex slavery among women and girls. According to Tom Brokaw, “Half the Sky is a passionate and persuasive plea to all of us to rise up and say ‘No more!’ to the seventeenth-century abuses to girls and women in the twenty-first- century world. This is a book that will pierce your heart and arouse your conscience.” 

WuDunn graduated from Cornell University, where she has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 2002, a member of the Board’s Finance Committee, a former co-chair of the Board’s Academic Affairs Committee and former member of the multi- billion dollar endowment’s Investment Committee.   She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a former member of its Advisory Council. WuDunn received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College.

A book signing and receoption will follow the November event.

For more information about the speaker or the Difficult Dialogue event, please contact Margaret Arnold at marnold@ithaca.edu.