04/30/2009
SUNY Cortland Associate Professor of History Girish Bhat will offer his thoughts about whether democracy has stood the test of time in the modern political climate at a community roundtable on Thursday, May 7, at the College.
Titled “The Uncertainty of Democracy: The 21st Century and the ‘Beginning of History,’” the roundtable takes place between 8-9 a.m. in the College’s Park Center Hall of Fame Room. Sponsored by the President’s Office and the College’s Center for Educational Exchange, the event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 7:45 a.m. The Park Center is located off Tompkins Street and parking is available in the Park Center lot.
Bhat, who chairs the History Department, will be the sole roundtable panelist. He will engage the audience in a discussion about the crucial role of law in promoting and sustaining democracy. The audience will learn how an understanding of law and its history should keep the west, and especially Americans, from assuming that any way of life is a given.
“After the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989-91, it appeared that the west had triumphed at last,” explained Bhat, who joined the College in 1992. “Yet two decades later, the debate about the absolute, timeless superiority of democracy and capitalism continues and has only been sharpened by the current global economic slide.”
A published author of articles in his field, Bhat served as an editor for PRAVO, a Russian law journal, and has made many conference presentations around the country and in Canada.
Bhat, an advisory faculty member for international studies, is a participant in World First Learning Community, where he coordinates campus and extracurricular events and assists in grant acquisitions for the activities.
He is a representative on the College’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Committee, serves as a faculty
A member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the American Society for Legal History, Bhat continues to pursue his research in Russian, German and French.
He graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Bhat earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of California, Berkeley.
For more information on the Community Roundtable series, contact the Center for Educational Exchange at (607) 753-4214 or visit the Web site at www.cortland.edu/cee.