Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where her research areas include national security strategy, NATO, and alliances and U.S.-led international order. She returns to the Chautauqua Lecture Series for a week on “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes” to examine the contemporary legacy of American warfare — from Vietnam through Afghanistan to the current day — asking what mistakes we’ve learned from and those we’ve not, and how this can inform American military strategy as we engage in a new era of diplomacy and defense.

Before joining AEI, Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at King’s College, Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland, and served as senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008.

Schake is the author of five books, including America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?; Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony; State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department; and Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance. She is also the coeditor, along with former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, of Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military.

Schake holds a PhD and MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, as well as an MPM from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. She received her bachelor’s degree in international relations from Stanford University.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, historian and journalist Kai Bird is the co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the definitive biography of the theoretical physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” that served as inspiration for director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan’s most recent film, “Oppenheimer.” A relentless chronicler of history and a consummate storyteller, Bird elevates lessons from the past to undeniable relevance for audiences of today. He joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series in a week confronting “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes” to discuss the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose groundbreaking work altered the course of history, and help us navigate the tremendous ethical and moral ramifications of that work.

For American Prometheus, Bird and his late co-author Martin J. Sherwin were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography, the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History. Bird is the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, and biographies of Jimmy Carter, John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, which was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The executive director and distinguished lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, his work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the CIA.

An elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians, Bird received his bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and his master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.