Sylvia Nasar, economist and author of A Beautiful Mind, to speak at CSB

Author, economist and professor Sylvia Nasar speaks at 5 p.m. Monday, March 3, at the Gorecki Family Theater, Benedicta Arts Center of the College of Saint Benedict, St. Joseph.

Her speech, “Globalization: Then and Now,” is free and open to the public.

Nasar earned her master’s degree in economics at New York University. For four years, she did research with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief at the Institute for Economic Analysis and then became a journalist. Since 1983, she has been a writer at Fortune, a columnist at U.S. News & World Report and, until recently, a reporter at The New York Times, where she covered economics.

A Beautiful Mind, her first book, deals with the story of John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who for 30 years was stricken with paranoid schizophrenia. The book won the 1998 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and inspired a feature movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe, which won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Picture. She recently served as a consultant on a PBS television documentary about Nash.

Nasar, who edited The Essential John Nash, is currently working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers. She has recently been named the first John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Nasar’s visit is sponsored by the CSB Renaissance Lecture Series, the Literary Arts Institute at CSB, the department of economics at CSB and Saint John’s University, and the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement at CSB/SJU.