PHOTO COURTESY OF BRETT O'BANNON
Bret O’Bannon is a Leonard E. and Mary B. Howell professor of political science, associate professor of political science and coordinator of the conflict studies program at DePauw University. Professor O’Bannon focuses on areas related to political, gender and economic development in the Third World, specifically West Africa. His current research is on mass atrocity and humanitarian intervention. He was born in Florida, but spent much of his life in Louisville, Kentucky before coming to Indiana. He received his Bachelors degree from the University of Louisville and went to graduate school at the University of Indiana.
This week, The DePauw had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor O’Bannon and learning more about him.
The DePauw: What is your favorite class that you have ever taught here?
Bret O’Bannon: I would say this course on humanitarian intervention. It engages with some of the things that matter most to me. It engages with ethics. Questions like “Is it appropriate to use military force for humanitarian purposes?”… There are all kinds of ethical issues. Is it okay to violate state sovereignty? There are ethical and legal and all kinds of political dilemmas. They rise real troubling, difficult vexing questions that students are really prepared to engage with at an interesting level. I think that course is probably consistently my favorite course to teach.
TDP: What is your favorite moment from your years at DePauw
O’Bannon: I have like a genre of moments. I think my favorite moments are encounters with former students living their dreams. I can’t tell you how delightful it is to see students doing what they have envisioned. Its cool to watch these life trajectories, there is no way of predicting where they will go. I was in Washington a few months ago and had ice cream with two of my former students, and its nice to see them doing what they dreamed of doing…These moments are I think are my most rewarding. That’s not to say that times here on campus aren’t really rewarding. Watching people in class make connections, seeing the lights go on. Seeing them realize how things are much more complicated than we tend to imagine and seeing that as a healthy thing. Those are some of my favorites.
TDP: Did you think that when you were younger, this was the kind of place [profession] you would end up in?
O’Bannon: No, not for a long time. I wanted to be a lawyer. And then I made the mistake of studying abroad for a year and that was one of the most transformative years of my life. That’s why I so sternly encourage my students to study abroad. My year in France was 1990-1991. The Gulf War was taking place. I was in southern France and there were lots of North Africans there so it was a really fraught space. But I realized that year, that what I liked most in life was conversation, was a committed serious inquiry into the world’s problems. So we stayed up very late most nights over a bottle of wine and solve the world’s problems. And it dawned on me, and my plan was to return but I actually finished my undergraduate degree over their, but my plan was to return and go to law school. I realized that year that if I did that,that I would eventually have to leave college and those conversations would cease or greatly diminish. And it was that year that I realized that the way I could stay connected to that kind of life was to stay in the academy and so that’s what I did.