Former U.S. Ambassador Vicki Latham Huddleston will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, Sept. 18, at the University of South Carolina Upstate.
The lecture is titled, titled, “The Decline in Diplomacy and the Rise of Terrorism in Africa: Implications for Economic Development, Migration, Peace and Security.” A VIP luncheon will take place at 11:30 a.m. (by invitation), followed by the lecture at 1 p.m.
Admission to the lecture is free and open to the public. Online registration is open until September 10.
Huddleston is a retired, career Senior Foreign Service officer who recently published the memoir, “Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle with Castro’s Cuba.”
During her 30-year career in foreign affairs, Huddleston worked for the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense. Her last government assignment was as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African Affairs from 2009 to 2011. Prior to that, she was chargé d’ affaires ad interim to Ethiopia, U.S. ambassador to Mali, principal officer of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1999-2002), and U.S. ambassador to Madagascar. Huddleston was a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institute before she joined the Department of Defense. She was chief of party for a USAID-funded capacity building project in Haiti from 2013-2015.
Huddleston earned a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado. She is the co-author of “Learning to Salsa: New Steps in U.S.-Cuba Relations,” and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and The Washington Post. Please direct questions to Dr. Alex Akulli, director of the Center for International Studies, by phone at 864-503-5769, or email [email protected].