Dr. René Lemarchand To Lecture About Rwandan Genocide At Manhattan College

RIVERDALE, N.Y. – Dr. René Lemarchand, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida, will deliver a lecture at Manhattan College on Thursday, Feb. 15 at 7:30 p.m. in Smith Auditorium as part of the Holocaust Resource Center’s visiting scholar series.

Lemarchand’s lecture The Rwandan Genocide and the Politics of Memory is free and open to the public.

A prolific and insightful essayist both in English and French, Lemarchand is recognized around the world as a leading expert on the cycle of violence in central Africa that engulfed Rwanda in 1994. He has published widely on the genocides in Burundi, Rwanda and most recently, Darfur.

Lemarchand has taught for more than four decades at the University of Florida. He was educated in his native France and earned his doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles. He holds numerous awards and distinctions and has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe, Africa and North America.

In addition to having testified before congressional committees, Lemarchand is the author of several essays, review articles and books, including The World Bank in Rwanda (1982) and Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (1995).

The mission of Manhattan College’s Holocaust Resource Center is to promote Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to educate people about the Holocaust, its significance to the present and about other genocides around the world. The primary audiences are the College community, the Riverdale neighborhood and current and future teachers in the surrounding area.    

For more information about this event, please contact Dr. Jeff Horn, associate professor of history and associate director of the Holocaust Resource Center at Manhattan College, at (718) 862-7129 or jeff.horn@manhattan.edu.

Members of the media who would like to cover the event should call Scott Silversten at (718) 862-7232 or e-mail scott.silversten@manhattan.edu. Manhattan College is located at West 242nd Street near Broadway in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one mile from the Westchester County line and accessible by MTA subway line 1.

Founded in 1853, Manhattan College is an independent, Catholic, coeducational institution of higher learning offering more than 40 major programs of undergraduate study in the areas of arts, business, education, engineering and science, along with graduate programs in education and engineering. For more information about Manhattan College, visit www.manhattan.edu.