I have been organizing the Free Enterprise Speaker Series (FESS) since I arrived here at WCU in 2012. I inherited it from my good friend Steve Miller, who was on faculty here with me for three years and is the reason I moved here from San Jose State. Over the years our speakers have included Amity Shlaes, Peter Boettke, Virginia Postrel, Ben Powell, Don Boudreaux, Robert A. Levy, Fernando Tesón, Robert Lawson, Sandra Peart, Loren Lomasky, Jeffrey Tucker, Jason Brennan, Radley Balko, Michelle Vachris, and more. We have covered economic freedom, free trade, the ethics of eating meat, globalization, virtue ethics, libertarianism, tax reform, police militarization and more. And we’ve had thousands of people attend. It’s been both a pleasure and an expansion of my own education to participate in FESS. And I could not be more excited to welcome our next guest speaker, Professor Siri Terjeson of American University and the Norwegian School of Economics.
Siri is a management professor who is very active in publishing (see her Google Scholar page). Her research takes a cross-country approach to issues that include social entrepreneurship, women on corporate boards, and more. Her work helps to make systematic comparisons and analyses of topics that are frequently studied using case studies of single markets and countries. Her talk tonight will focus on some of her better-known cross-country research on social entrepreneurship. She will record a 15-20 minute podcast with me later today, which we’ll make available here on our new website, and her lecture will be live-streamed on our Facebook. Welcome Siri, and thanks for coming!