Brown-bag lecture series kicks off with focus on State Department

Mr. Matthew P. Roth, the Commandant’s Distinguished Chair for Diplomatic Studies at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) and Department of State liaison to the Combined Arms Center, presented the inaugural lecture for academic year 2019 of the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series on August 27.

A career Foreign Service Officer, Mr. Roth’s presentation centered on purpose and mission of the U.S. Department of State, and the evolution of American statecraft. Roth reviewed the conduct of U.S. diplomacy in the current global environment, encompassing political, economic and social considerations before opening the floor to questions from more than 60 CGSC students, faculty, and staff.

Matthew Roth’s area of published research is the relationship between diplomatic and military actors and subnational governments. Prior to this assignment, Roth was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda. Over the course of more than two decades in the Foreign Service he has served in Washington, D.C. and at embassies across Africa and Latin America. Roth has a Master degree in Public Administration with a specialization in urban planning and city/local government from the University of Kansas, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Latin American Area Studies from the same institution. He speaks Portuguese, Spanish, German and Italian..

The InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series is co-hosted by the CGSC Foundation’s Simons Center with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School (CGSS). The lecture series is an extracurricular, interagency topic-focused series that is intended to help enrich the CGSS curriculum. The CGSC Foundation and the Simons Center have received support for all brown-bag lectures in academic year 2019 from First Command Financial Services in Leavenworth, Kansas. The presentations are scheduled each month.- See the full schedule.

All lectures in the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series are free and open to the public. As the series moniker states, the lecture series is conducted in the traditional “brown-bag lunch” format. – Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches into the conference room. Members of the public coming to the lectures from off-post will need to add extra time to check-in at the Fort Leavenworth visitor center. – For gate information, see the Fort Leavenworth homepage.

Visit the CGSC Foundation album on Flickr for more photos from the lecture.

See the video of the full lecture below.