Join us for an in-person talk by Maine author and journalist, Colin Woodard

Three years after the 1/6 attack on the Capitol, the U.S. remains on the brink of a collapse into authoritarian rule, Woodard argues, with the federation's future uncertain. Woodard describes why the U.S. has always been vulnerable to collapse and how a lost civic national story of origins, purpose, identity can help bring us back from the verge.

COLIN WOODARD is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center. A New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist, he is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. As State and National affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. A contributing editor at POLITICO, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.

A native of Maine, he has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that followed. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a past Pew Fellow in international journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in public advocacy.