The 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder will commence with its annual participant march through the historic Norlin Quadrangle and into Macky Auditorium at 11 a.m. on Monday, April 6.
The procession will travel along a walkway lined with more than 80 international flags from south to north and proceed into the auditorium for the 11:30 a.m. keynote address by former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States.
Leading the march will be CU President Bruce Benson, College of Arts and Sciences Dean Todd Gleeson, CWA Director Jim Palmer, CWA co-chairs Jane Butcher and Juli Steinhauer, and Hagel. They will be joined by conference participants, students and CWA volunteers.
Benson will make welcoming remarks and introduce Hagel prior to his keynote address on "21st Century International Relations." Hagel served two terms in the U.S. Senate representing Nebraska from 1997 to 2009, and is a distinguished professor at Georgetown University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The keynote address is free and open to the public, as are all 190 CWA events being held April 6-10.
At 4 p.m. Monday, film critic Roger Ebert will make his 39th conference appearance at another CWA tradition, "Cinema Interruptus." Each year Ebert leads an analysis of one film over several days after screening it in its uninterrupted form on Monday. His selection this year is "Chop Shop," an independent film by Iranian-American director, Ramin Bahrani, who will join Ebert in this year's analysis.
The theme of this year's conference is "Perspective 360." A complete schedule and biographies of all 97 conference participants are available online at .
The eight primary sponsors of this year's conference are the Camera, Albion Interactive, Boulder Weekly, Alem International Management, Circle Graphics, Gold Lake Resort, Hotel Boulderado and OneRiot Social Search Engine.
For more information contact Ilina Datkhaeva at 303-492-2515 or Peter Caughey in the CU-Boulder Office of Media Relations and News Services at 303-492-4007.