To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com)

The PCFR's next dinner comes fast, next Wednesday, Sept. 21, when our speaker will be:

Columbia University Prof. Morris Rossabi, one of the world’s  greatest experts on Inner Asia and particularly Mongolia: a democracy stuck between the aggressive police states of Russia and China, Sept. 21.  How does this faraway country do it? Professor Rossabi will be speaking to us  very soon after returning from Mongolia and Korea; he may say a few things about the latest in North Korea’s threats to northeast Asia and beyond.

Prof. Rossabi is the author or editor of 20 books, including China and Inner Asia, Kublai Khan: His Life and Times, Voyager from Xanadu, Modern Mongolia, and China Among Equals. He has also written more than 100 articles or chapters in books and wrote all of the sections on Inner Asia in three separate volumes of the authoritative Cambridge History of China.

(Perhaps he’ll say some things about Genghis Khan, who DNA evidence suggest was an ancestor of many of us. He really got around Eurasia.)

Morris Rossabi has served as a board member of the Project on Central Eurasia and chair of the Board on Arts and Culture of the Soros Foundation. Professor Rossabi has collaborated on exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has served as a consultant to foundations, museums, universities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Having taught Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Central Asian, and Islamic history, he conducts research in a dozen languages. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is an advocate of international and cross-cultural education.