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From 2011-2017, I was privileged to serve as Dean of American University’s School of International Service, overseeing 120 faculty members, 70 staff, and 3,000 students.  During my time as dean, we hired a diverse group of 26 tenure-line faculty members, who represent a wide range of fields including political science, economics, history, geography, sociology and medical anthropology.  We established the first fully on-line M.A. program in international relations in the United States that now enrolls more than 300 students, one-third of whom are U.S. military, either active-duty or veterans.  Our undergraduate and graduate programs are ranked in the top 10, and during my tenure, our PhD program was ranked in the top 25 for the first time. I created an SIS Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion, and we established an Exploring Identities Series designed to foster greater inclusivity in the field of international affairs.  I hosted a number of high-level speakers at the School, including President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Congressman John Lewis, and Chinese Vice-Premier Liu Yandong.  For the last two years of my deanship, I was proud to serve as president of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, where I led the effort to increase the global presence of the organization.

One of my passions is promoting high quality academic research that is policy relevant and publicly engaged.  I serve as a senior adviser to the Bridging the Gap Initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and by the Raymond Frankel Foundation. BtG has trained hundreds of scholars over the past fifteen years to produce policy-relevant academic research and conduct theoretically grounded policy work.  Many of our PhD and faculty alumni have become leaders in academia, government and the private sector.  We have engaged university leadership from around the country in the effort to promote this work; in June 2016, we convened 13 provosts to discuss ways of fostering greater policy and public engagement and followed that up with a meeting of provosts and foundation representatives.  And our Bridging the Gap book series with Oxford University Press includes fourteen books published since the launch of the series in 2018, and others forthcoming or under contract.

I am currently in residence as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. I am also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution.  From 2017-19, I was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2018-19, I also held the Library of Congress Chair in U.S.-Russia Relations at the John W. Kluge Center.  You can find some of the articles I have written recently on the publications page.  I have authored or edited six books, four of which examined different aspects of American foreign policy after the Cold War, including NATO enlargement and U.S.-Russia relations.  I have been very lucky to have had some amazing co-authors over the years, including Naazneen Barma, Sarah Binder, Agneska Bloch, Derek Chollet, Zsuzsa Csergo, Ivo Daalder, Michael Desch, Lindsey Ford, Gorana Grgic, Bruce Jentleson, Jonathan Kirshner, James Lindsay, Garret Martin, Michael McFaul, Carmen Iezzi Mezzera, Sara Bjerg Moller, Alina Polyakova, Elizabeth Saunders, Joshua Shifrinson, Jeremi Suri, Jordan Tama, Philip Tetlock, Steve Weber, Andrew Weiss, Tamara Cofman Wittes, and Lily Wojtowicz, and I look forward to future collaborative work on international relations and foreign policy decision-making in addition to my single-authored projects.