In partnership with Belmont University and The Center for Global Citizenship

Election 2024 Panel (Town Hall)

Belmont University – Massey Rogers Boardroom (Parking on Inman Center)
1601-1603 Wedgewood Av.
Nashville, TN 37201

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Moderator:

Dr. Breck Walker, PhD

Breck Walker pursued a twenty years’ career international business, law, and finance,
before turning to academia. For several years, he taught foreign policy courses at
Sewanee, The University of the South, and worked as a contract historian for the Office
of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, researching and writing on early Pentagon
policies in the computer security and cyber areas. Dr. Walker is currently retired.

 

Panelists:

Congressman Jim Cooper

James Hayes Shofner Cooper is an American lawyer, businessman, professor, and politician who served as the U.S. representative for from 2003 to 2023. His district included all of Nashville. He chaired the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the House Armed Services Committee, and sat on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, United States House Committee on the Budget, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, more committees than any other member of Congress. Jim is completing a book on the history of US national security space. A co-founder of US Space Force, Jim regards satellites as the “infrastructure of all infrastructures” in every nation, the central nervous system of the planet. Jim knows corporations as well as Congress, working today for a private-equity firm that specializes in US manufacturing and having taught for twenty years at Vanderbilt’s business school. He has also worked with some of the largest and most intractable bureaucracies in the US. Jim graduated with highest honors as a Morehead Scholar from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

Dr. John Greer

John G. Geer is Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair, and Co-Director of the Vanderbilt Poll.  He earned his PhD from Princeton University and his BA from Franklin and Marshall College.  Geer is past editor of The Journal of Politics. Geer has published widely on campaigns, elections, and public opinion.  His In Defense of Negativity: Attacks Ads in Presidential Campaigns won Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize.  Geer is about to publish the sixth edition of Gateways to Democracy (2025). He has provided extensive commentary in the news media about American politics, including live nationwide interviews for FOX, CNN, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, NPR, and BBC.  Geer has also written numerous op-ed pieces for Politico, The Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and The Tennessean.  His teaching has earned him several awards at Vanderbilt, including the “Squirrel Award,” the Birkby Prize, the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching, and the Vanderbilt Alumni Education Award.

 

Dr. Thomas Schwartz

Thomas Alan Schwartz is the Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Political Science and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Originally from Rochester, New York, he studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities, and completed his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University under the supervision of Professor Ernest R. May and Professor Charles Maier. He is the author of the books America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Harvard University Press) and Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam, also Harvard University Press. He was the co-editor with Matthias Schulz of The Strained Alliance: US-European Relations in the 1970s, (Cambridge University Press). His most recent book is Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography, published by Hill and Wang in 2020. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the German Historical Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Nobel Institute. He served on the Historical Advisory Committee of the Department of State and was the President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.