Central and Eastern European affairs specialists Radek Sikorski and Anne Applebaum will speak at Samford University Monday, Oct. 10, as part of the school's Rushton Lecture series. The presentation, open to the pubic, will be at 3 p.m. in the moot courtroom of Robinson law building.

Sikorski, who was recently elected to the Polish Senate, will speak on "U.S.-European Relations."

Applebaum, Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, will speak on "Reflections on the Soviet Gulag."

Sikorski is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He is a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and deputy minister of defense in Poland, and a former secretary of foreign affairs for the Solidarity Party. He is a specialist in topics related to Eastern Europe, NATO, alliance politics, missile defense, Afghanistan and Angola.

Applebaum has written extensively about issues related to Communism and the development of civil society in Eastern Europe and the USSR/Russia. She is the author of Between East and West, which received an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996, and Gulag: A History, which received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction writing.

Sikorski and Applebaum are married and live in Washington, D.C.

The Rushton Lecture Series honors the late Samford graduate and longtime attorney Ray Rushton.