George Mason University

Before President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Jan. 24, 2012, Richard Norton Smith, Scholar in Residence in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, spoke with Politico's David Mark about the effectiveness of the annual speech.

Dan Cohen, director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, will speak about the future of history on Monday, Jan. 30, as part of the 2011-12 Vision Series at Mason.

Pedro Serrano, a Mexican poet, and Rei Berroa, a professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, will host a discussion covering the Nobel Prize-winning Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, who passed away in 1996. The discussion takes place at the Library of Congress.