Hamilton Library’s 2025-26 Hawaiʻi Congressional Papers Collection Research Fellow, Daniel De Varona Brennan, will give his talk, “Honorable Men and Rogue Elephants: The Origins and Implications of Congressional Oversight of the CIA,” at 2 p.m. on Oct. 18 in Hamilton Library Room Room 301. The hybrid event will also be available on Zoom.

Brennan will explore how the U.S. Congress, in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act, asserted oversight over the intelligence community. He will highlight the pivotal role Senator Daniel K. Inouye played as the first Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, shaping a framework of accountability that endures to this day. Brennan is a visiting scholar who is using Senator Inouye’s papers, which are housed in the Hawaiʻi Congressional Papers Collection at Hamilton Library, to conduct this research. 

About the Speaker

Daniel De Varona Brennan is a Predoctoral Fellow with the America in the World Consortium at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a DPhil Candidate at Oriel College, University of Oxford. His dissertation examines the emergence and evolution of U.S. Congressional Oversight of Intelligence during the Cold War.

Registration

To attend in person, please register by sending an email to archives@hawaii.edu with your name, and those of your guests, if you will be bringing anyone else.  

To join by zoom – please click here to register prior to the event.

Event Sponsors

Daniel K. Inouye Institute, Hamilton Library, College of Social Sciences, and ʻUluʻulu Moving Image Archive