The Lemnitzer Center for NATO and European Union Studies at Kent State University will host speaker Lieutenant Colonel Steven Oluic, career Army officer and assistant professor of geography at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. Oluic will discuss “NATO and Europe’s Future Relationship with the United States” on Monday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Kent State Student Center’s Governance Chambers on the second floor.

In his presentation, Oluic will address the question of whether NATO is an organization in peril. He will focus on how NATO again is experiencing serious intrabloc stresses resulting, in part, from U.S. policy. Many member states have resisted involvement in the Afghanistan campaign, expressed reservations over the Ballistic Missile Defense system program planned for deployment in the Czech Republic and Poland, and opposed NATO’s possible expansion to two more of Russia’s bordering states. Not since the uproar and projections of its impending demise during the 1999 Kosovo air war has this supranational organization been so challenged.

A native of Cleveland, Oluic served as director of military science at Kent State and received his Ph.D. in geography in 2005 from Kent State. At West Point, he currently instructs geography courses on Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union, world regional geography, and urban geography. In addition, Oluic is an active scholar who has received several research travel grants and has been invited to speak at the U.S. Department of State, Columbia University, the Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous other institutions.

Oluic is recipient of the Association of American Geographer’s 2004 George and Viola Hoffman National Award for his research in Southeastern Europe. His book, Bosnia & Herzegovina: Identity, Nationalist Landscapes and the Future of the State, will be published soon by the Columbia University Press. Oluic’s research interests include national identity, radical Islam and the Balkans, transnational organized crime, and the geopolitical developments and future of the successor states of Yugoslavia and Southeastern Europe.

For more information, call 330-672-0910.