Professor Diddy R. M. Hitchins (University of Alaska Anchorage) and Professor Douglas C. Nord (Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Umeå), will explore the two dimensions of US Arctic policy - the Alaskan perspective and one viewed from Washington, D.C. Special focus will be also on the US performance in the major regional intergovernmental forum - the Arctic Council.
Diddy R. M. Hitchins has a BA in Social Sciences (Politics; Sociology; Economics) from the University of Southampton, UK, and MA (Political Behaviour) and PhD (Government) from the University of Essex, UK. From 1976 to 2006 she was Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), USA, specializing in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Her research focus has been on the politics of the Arctic and North Pacific regions with special emphasis on Canada and the Russian Far East. At UAA she was the founding Director of the Model United Nations of Alaska which has won national recognition. She also served as UAA’s Director of International Studies and was the founding Director of Canadian Studies, and North Pacific Studies (China, the Koreas, Japan, the Russian Far East and Canada) at UAA. Diddy Hitchins served a term as President of the Association for Canadian Studies in the US (ACSUS) and was responsible for several faculty development study tours to the Canadian North and West. In 2005 Queen Elizabeth II made Diddy Hitchins a Member of the British Empire (MBE) in recognition for her service as British Honorary Consul for Alaska since 1985. Since becoming Professor Emerita in 2006, Diddy Hitchins has continued to work on projects with a focus on Arctic international relations. One of her goals is to ensure the development of a Model Arctic Council program under the auspices of the University of the Arctic as a tool for youth leadership development in the Arctic.
Professor Douglas Nord is an established scholar in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. His areas of specialty include the foreign and northern development policies of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia as well as the United States. He has written extensively on the relations between the countries of the circumpolar north and on the emergence of the Arctic as a central concern of contemporary international politics. Nord received his undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of Redlands and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the Duke University in the United States. He has lectured at several universities in Europe and North America including the University of Birmingham, the University of Minnesota, Wright State University and most recently at Western Washington University. He served as the Founding Dean of the Faculty of Management and Administration at the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada. In 2013 he was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Umeå in Sweden where he conducted a study of the Swedish Chairmanship of the Arctic Council which will soon be published.