Author, teacher, scholar and human rights activist Adam Hochschild will present the annual Herbert Carlyle Libby Lecture on Thursday, March 30, at 7:30 p.m. in Colby College’s Pugh Center. Hochschild’s lecture "Why Can’t Russia Shake Its Stalinist Heritage?" is open to the public and free of charge. A reception will follow.

Hochschild also will host a slide presentation at 4 p.m. in the Pugh Center that will be followed by a question and answer session and refreshments.

Hochschild is the author of five books, including The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin and King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hochschild graduated cum laude from Harvard University and began his career as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has since made numerous literary contributions to newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Washington Post.

In his books and many magazine articles, Hochschild has written about human rights issues on four continents. Hochschild’s work has won awards from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, and the Society of American Travel Writers. In 1997 and 1998 he spent five months as a Fulbright Lecturer in India and now teaches a writing class at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

The annual lecture was created in honor of Herbert Carlyle Libby, a 1902 graduate of Colby who served as an integral member of the college faculty until 1943. The Herbert Carlyle Libby Lecture is sponsored by Willard ’37 and Rebecca Libby P’77 and by the Colby College German and Russian, History, International Studies and Sociology Departments.