Thomas W. Simons Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Poland, returns as the Provost's Visiting Professor at Cornell and will deliver a lecture titled "Islam and the West Since Iraq" Monday, Feb. 21, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall on campus. The talk is free and open to the public. 

During Simons' Cornell visit, which runs through Friday, Feb. 25, he will meet with faculty and student groups and participate in a colloquium hosted by the Department of Government, a Peace Studies Program seminar, and government and business classes, among other activities.

Simons served as ambassador to Poland (1990-1993) and coordinator of U.S. assistance to the new independent states of the former Soviet Union (1993-1995). In that latter capacity, he visited all the new central Asian states and conferred with the presidents of the new republics. Simons later served as ambassador to Pakistan (1996-1998). He now is director of the Program on Eurasia in Transition at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He also was a consulting professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Between 1998 and 2002, Simons served as a consulting professor on 20th-century international history at Stanford. He is current chair of the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. 

Along with former senior officials from China, India, Pakistan and Russia, Simons participates in CISAC's Five-Nation Project on Asian Regional Security and Economic Development, which met most recently in Palo Alto, Calif., in June 2003 and in St. Petersburg, Russia, in December 2003. He also was among former senior officials who discussed Afghanistan under the auspices of the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan (UNSMA) in 2000-01. 

Simons is the author of some three dozen articles on Central and Eastern European history and on U.S. policy and East-West relations in South Asia, and he has written three books: The End of the Cold War? (1990) and Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (2nd revised edition, 1993), both published by St. Martin's Press, and Islam in a Globalizing World (Stanford University Press, 2003), based on the Payne Distinguished Lectures he delivered at Stanford in spring 2002.