The president of PEN American Center, the internationally acclaimed literary and human rights association, will explore some of the central ethical questions of our time during his upcoming lecture at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

Kwame Anthony Appiah — often called a post-modern Socrates — will present his lecture, “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers” on Thursday, April 8 at 1 p.m. in Olin B Lecture Hall.

Appiah will ask profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes.

Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He was born in London to a Ghanaian father and white mother; raised in Ghana and educated in England at Cambridge University. As a scholar of African and African-American studies, he established himself as an intellectual with a broad reach. In 2007, his book Cosmopolitanism won the Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. In 2009, he was featured in the documentary, “Examined Life” and was named one of "Foreign Policy’s” top 100 public intellectuals.

His lecture is free and open to the public.