On 15th April 2021, the School of Social Sciences welcomes one of the most senior UNHCR officials in the Mediterranean, an area that has been the epicentre of refugee flows into Europe for over a decade. Jason Hepps, the UNHCR’s Deputy Representative in Greece, will present the 2021 Arthur Lewis Lecture, the School’s flagship social responsibility lecture, entitled “Refugees & the Mediterranean: can one be both pragmatic and principled?”
Jason has been working for UNHCR since 2004 in various positions throughout the world, including country and field offices in Djibouti (2004-2005), Liberia (2006-2010) and Montenegro (2011). In Headquarters, he served as Senior Executive Assistant to the Assistant High Commissioner for Operations (2012-2015), and most recently as Senior Regional Protection Coordinator for the Syria situation in UNHCR’s Middle East and North Africa Bureau based in Jordan (2016-2019). He participated in extended emergency field missions with UNHCR, including in Syria (2014/15) and Peru (2016). From 1998-2000, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in northwest Togo, focusing on community health and development.
Jason holds graduate degrees in Public Policy (Princeton University, 2011) and International Law (University of California – Hastings College of the Law, 2004), a Bachelor’s Degree in American Studies (University of Michigan, 1997), and is a member of the California Bar Association.?
We are delighted to welcome Jason to present this prestigious lecture to honour Sir William Arthur Lewis, economist, Nobel Prize winner and Britain’s first Black professor. After the lecture there will be an extended Q&A session, chaired by Professor Dimitris Papadimitriou, where attendees will be able to address questions to the speaker.
Our series of annual Arthur Lewis Lectures started in 2015 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the economist Arthur Lewis, who became Britain's first black professor when he was appointed to a Chair at Manchester in 1948.
