Sheila Heslin, a former director for Russian, Ukranian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council in the White House, will deliver a lecture at Cornell University Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 11:15 a.m. in 165 McGraw Hall. Heslin recently testified before the U.S. Senate Government Affairs Committee about her efforts to help prevent President Clinton from meeting with a prospective campaign contributor who sought Clinton's support for a billion-dollar oil pipeline project in the Caspian Sea area.

Heslin will deliver the lecture to an undergraduate class on U.S. foreign relations. Limited seating will be available in the auditorium for the public.

Heslin graduated from Cornell in 1985, where she was a College Scholar. She earned a master's in public policy from Harvard, and from 1991 to 1994 she was a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, where she was responsible for developing policy toward the successor state of the former Soviet Union.

Heslin was awarded a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship at the World Bank prior to her appointment to the Security Council and worked at the Export-Import Bank where she prepared a study on financial sector reform in the Soviet Union.

She has authored and co-authored a number of articles, including "Perestroika: A Sustainable Process for Change" and "Pressures for Reform in the East European Economies."

Heslin's visit to Cornell is made possible by the Walter LaFeber and Joel Silbey Fund in American History. The fund's sponsor is David F. Maisel '68, who studied under LaFeber during the 1960s and was a political reporter for the Cornell Daily Sun.

Recognizing the impact that LaFeber and Joel Silbey, the President White Professor of History, have on Cornell history students, Maisel decided to endow a fund in their names to enhance the teaching of American history at Cornell, generally, and to allow the history department to bring other outstanding historians to campus to interact with undergraduates.

Heslin also will lecture at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 1:25 p.m.

The LaFeber/Silbey Fund also will bring Jonathan Spence, the distinguished historian of China, and his wife, the writer Annping Chin, to lecture at Cornell Nov. 20 to 21. Spence will lecture in 165 McGraw Hall Thurday, Nov. 20, at 4:30 p.m. on "What Is Going On With China's 20th-Century History?" Chin will lecture on her study of a 20th century Chinese family in 374 Rockefeller Friday, Nov. 21, at 12:15 p.m.