Barber's talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the President's Office and the Office of the Dean of Faculty. His talk is a component of the Sophomore Seminar cluster on globalization, a series of 12 student classes involving approximately 90 underclass students.
Barber has served as a consultant for major political and civic leaders in the United States and Europe, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Senator Bill Bradley and President Roman Herzog of Germany. He has been sought out by these key figures because he has spent the past 20 years writing about the fate of civil society in the age of global capitalism.
Formerly the director of Rutgers University's Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, which he founded in 1989, Barber joined the political science department at the University of Maryland in 2001. Barber is the author of 19 books, including Strong Democracy (1984), as well as the international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), which has been translated into 10 languages. Last summer his book The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House was published by W.W. Norton & Company.
In addition to meeting with political leaders, Barber also consults with organizations such as the Corporation for National Service, the United States Information Agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in Europe, UNESCO, the European Parliament and the Swedish Parliamentary Commission on Democracy.
Barber's honors include Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Fellowships, the Berlin Prize of American Academy of Berlin (2001) and the chair of American Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. In 2001 he received the Palmes Academiques (Chevalier) from the French Government.
He writes frequently for Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Le Nouvel Observateur, Die Zeit, and many other scholarly and popular publications in America and Europe. He holds a certificate from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an M.A. and doctorate from Harvard University.