James D. Le Sueur

As an award-winning filmmaker and professor, I communicate in traditional and new media. My first feature documentary film, "The Art of Dissent" (2020) celebrates the resilience and power of artistic engagement in Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. The documentary’s main protagonists – Václav Havel, banned singer Marta Kubišová, and the underground rock group the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) – became the most recognizable dissidents during the 1970-80s. Havel bridged the disparate clusters of individuals and fused the literary, musical, political, and philosophical nonviolent elements into a hybrid network that eventually toppled the totalitarian regime in 1989. I'm currently making a new feature film, "Seasons of COVID," which I plan to release at film festivals in Fall 2022.

As an author, I specialize in 20th-Century international relations and focus on wars of national liberation and postcolonial history. "Uncivil War," my first book, examines cultural, intellectual, and political actors during Algeria's war of national liberation (1954-62). "Algeria since 1989" examines efforts and failures to carry through on democratic reform after independence in an international area. My writings focus on intellectual/cultural actors, political violence, Islam, colonialism, decolonization, postcolonialism, and theory. In 2006, Henri Alleg and I brought out his new edition English edition of "The Question," Alleg's banned 1958 best-selling memoire recounting his torture by the French in Algeria. I oversaw the English editions and translations of Mouloud Feraoun's two masterpieces, "Journal, 1955-1962-Reflections on the French-Algerian War" and "The Poor Man's Son." In 2001, along with "Ben Abro," I republished the groundbreaking fictional work, "Assassination, July 14," the book that made "The Day of the Jackal" possible in many ways. I edited "The Decolonization Reader" (Routledge 2003), and in 2002, I was appointed Senior Associate Member St Antony's College, Oxford. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 1996. I am the Samual Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where I chair of the Department of History.

I can be followed on Vimeo @https://vimeo.com/jameslesueur, on Twitter @jameslesueur, on Facebook @James Dean Le Sueur, and on Instagram @anticolonial and my filmmaker website is www.foxhollowfilms.com