Students and faculty make themselves heard at COP27
The new BGA program gives students a firsthand look at Gap’s worldwide supply chain REPORTING FROM THE FRONTLINES Alex Marquardt on his career—and covering the War in Ukraine
THE SFS COMMUNITY RESPONDS TO THE WAR IN UKRAINE ON MULTIPLE FRONTS
16 Dirt to Shirt
G EOR G ETOW N UNIVERSITY • 2022-2023
SFS is published regularly by Georgetown University's SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE, in conjunction with Washingtonian Media (washingtoniancustommedia.com). We welcome feedback and suggestions for future issues. Please contact Ara Friedman, Director of Communications, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Intercultural Center 301, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, D.C. 20057; by phone at 202-687-7949; or by email at ara.friedman@georgetown.edu. Website: sfs.georgetown.edu
Responding on All Fronts
Students, faculty and alumni react to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
12 Climate
A cohort of students, alumni and staff represented SFS at COP27.
BGA program students visited Gap facilities to learn about their supply chain.
18 Rhodes Scholars
Atharv Gupta (SFS’23) and Isabella Turilli (SFS’22) selected for prestigious scholarship.
20 Meet Our Students
Ana Lejava (MAERES’23) Patrick Coe (MASIA’23) Jazz Jones (SFS’25)
22 Showcasing Alumni
Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (MSFS’04)
Emmy-Award winning journalist Alex Marquardt (SFS’04)
26 Faculty Profiles SFS and Government Department Professor Abraham Newman
Professor Marwa Daoudy, climate change and security expert
30 Faculty Updates
32 MSFS Gala
The MSFS Centennial saw a weekend of celebration.
34 Symposium on Diplomacy
Students, alumni, faculty and leaders in government gathered to honor SFS Professor Madeleine K. Albright.
38 Events
facebook.com/georgetownsfs threads.net/@georgetown_sfs twitter.com/georgetownsfs instagram.com/georgetown_sfs linkedin.com/school/ georgetownsfs youtube.com/@GeorgetownSFS sfs.georgetown.edu
SFS students, faulty and alumni excel as they battle for a more sustainable and equitable world.
To our wonderful, engaged, global SFS community —What a year it’s been at SFS! To start, our students — the heart and soul of our school — continue to shine in so many ways. The numbers speak for themselves:
Georgetown students were the No. 1 recipients of Fulbright Scholarships in the nation this year with 49 scholarships offered — far more than any other university. This number was powered by 25 SFS students and alumni. These are eye-popping numbers at both the university and the school levels.
For the first time in 20 years, two Georgetown students won the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford — and both are from SFS. Isabella Turilli (SFS’22) and Atharv Gupta (SFS’23) are both majors in our innovative Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program, which is producing some of our most interesting young alumni. Gupta has also been one of our Pelosi Public Service Scholars. (You will read more about them later in the Magazine.) Over our history, SFS has produced more Rhodes scholars than all other Georgetown schools combined.
SFS was also first in the nation for Presidential Management Fellows and Pickering, Rangel and Payne Fellows, signature public service programs that
demonstrate the huge impact our students have after they leave the Hilltop. It’s been a banner year for recognition of the incredible students we have at SFS. At this moment of genuine global turmoil, it is inspiring to see our students committing so deeply to global engagement. They make us all very proud!
That global turmoil continued to feel very personal to SFS this year, as you will read in the story about how our students, faculty, staff and alumni responded to the ongoing war in Ukraine. We are especially grateful to and proud of our Ukrainian students — many of whose families are still in harm’s way in their home country — for the impactful roles they continue to play in our community. And we’re happy to be welcoming more Ukrainian students into our cohort during the 2023-2024 academic year as well.
“[SFS was] created to instill generations of leaders with the mission to promote and defend freedom in a complex and ever-changing world."
From fighting climate change and improving supply chains to serving in the United States Congress, you will read in this Magazine about the extraordinary work our students, faculty and alumni are doing to confront the greatest challenges facing our world today. That’s the very reason SFS was created over a century ago — to provide new generations of students with the tools to both analyze the complexities of the current geo-political moment and to develop innovative solutions to secure a more sustainable and equitable world.
We ended the 2022-2023 academic year with a moving commencement ceremony honoring political prisoners, ordinary people who have undertaken extraordinary acts to defend freedom, justice and democracy around the world. As we confront a world of increasing autocracy and repression, we recognized those who have sacrificed one of the most precious gifts — their freedom — as they are unjustly imprisoned or held hostage by governments and groups who seek to silence them. We partnered with Freedom House to highlight some of the many stories we could tell, including our own graduate Austin Tice (SFS’12, L’13), who has been imprisoned in Syria since 2012. At a school created to instill generations of leaders with the mission to promote and defend freedom in a complex and ever-changing world, this ceremony served as a call to action for our graduates and a reminder of the importance of the work they will go out into the world to do.
I hope that this issue of the SFS Magazine finds you well and gives you a real sense for the work we’re doing every day at SFS to train the next generation of leaders who will, in fact, change the world. I have never been more confident of that.
Joel Hellman Dean, School of Foreign Service
From the moment war broke out, the SFS community has shown their support for their Ukrainian peers.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a violent full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ushering in a new era of geopolitical turbulence. Recognizing the need to respond immediately, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service organized a town hall that afternoon. Dean Joel Hellman, Katerina Sedova (MSFS’18), a Ukrainian national who was then a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and SFS Professors Charles Kupchan and Caitlin Talmadge answered questions and provided context for this historic event. Students, faculty and community members packed the venue.
“I thought it was very important for us as a community to come together to show our solidarity for our students who are suffering, to show our solidarity with the people of Ukraine and come together,” Hellman said at the event.
It was just the beginning of the SFS response. As the war rages more than a year later, the SFS community continues to act on multiple fronts, with emergency scholarships for Ukrainian students, panel discussions, media commentary and classroom debates.
From the moment the war in Ukraine began, SFS sprang into action
BY SUSIE FRANK
Charles A. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Obama and Clinton. He considers the invasion part of a broader turning point in the international system.
“Russia just invaded its neighbor of 40-plus million people. China continues its economic and geopolitical ascent. The United States is experiencing tests of its democratic institutions that I never could have imagined,” he says. “This is a make-or-break moment in global history. And it’s the students who are in our classrooms right now who will have to go out and try to tame the world that is passing through a period of turbulent change.”
There’s no doubt that Iryna Adam (SSP’24) will be taming the world in the near future. While still in Ukraine, Adam was accepted to the Georgetown Security Studies program for the 20192020 academic year, but then the pandemic hit, and she decided to defer. She
“After the Russian invasion, my mom was very eager for me to go somewhere — anywhere. She was very worried about me.”
deferred again the next year, waiting until she could attend class in person.
Years passed, and by that time she had launched a successful career, first working at the National Democratic Institute in Ukraine, and then, after a series of promotions, at the Ukrainian government Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security. She was enjoying her work and had almost given up on her dream of attending SFS.
Then war broke out.
“After the Russian invasion, my mom was very eager for me to go somewhere — anywhere. She was very worried about me. I decided that
From left to right: Iryna Adam (SSP’24), Juliana Kogan (MASIA’23), Ruslana Kochmar (MSFS’23) and Nikita Makarenko (MSFS’24) in February 2023.
I’m either staying and working for the government or, if the logistics work out, I’m going to Georgetown.”
Adam was torn — she was excelling at work, and she didn’t want to leave her family. She had been dreaming of Georgetown, but didn’t know if she could afford it, even with her merit scholarship. She decided to email Georgetown to ask if there were additional scholarships available.
To her surprise, the SFS responded immediately — there just might be an opportunity. She was quickly chosen for the newly created Gracias Family Sunflower Current Use Scholarship. The scholarship would get her the SFS education she wanted — and out of harm’s way.
“I feel extremely lucky to be here, considering how my friends and my coworkers are still back home living in those hard conditions,” Adam says.
Another Gracias Scholar, Kyryl Myronenko (SFS’26), says life has been surreal since the Russian invasion.
“After that morning of February 24, my life was tipped upside down, and reality was not the same,” he says. “I live in central Ukraine, so there is no frontline anywhere close to my home. But still, you could feel the war’s impact on every single part of your life.”
Before the war, Myronenko was planning to pursue his bachelor’s degree in Ukraine, and then apply for a master’s degree at the SFS. But that plan crumbled after the war started. It became nearly impossible to get an education at home. So, he decided to take a bold step.
“I reached out to Georgetown — it was already April, and I thought I might be too late for that academic year. But they said yes,” Myronenko recalls. “They had all the necessary funds to take me and that was only possible because of the Gracias scholarship. It was absolutely incredible.”
He says at SFS the high-caliber
At the SFS event marking one year since the start of the war, attendees honored and remembered the lives lost.
Credit: Luke Huang.
professors, students and the culture are teaching him skills to help rebuild Ukraine when the time comes.
“It’s great to be able to soak up the overall atmosphere and to be able to learn and grow together with people,” Myronenko says. “I want to use my education to help my country recover, to become strong. I believe Ukraine is going to be the next big thing. This is my dream, my passion — to help make this happen.”
SFS has a long tradition of integrating current events into the curricula and encouraging discussion and debate among students. And the war in Ukraine is very much alive on campus and in the classrooms. Kupchan co-teaches the Foundations of Grand Strategy course with John McNeill, distinguished university professor in the SFS and history department.
“Last semester we took 20 minutes out of every class to talk about what had gone on in Ukraine the previous week, and how it related to the history we were reading. It brings the war home in a big way,” says Kupchan. In a different class, Kupchan had a Ukrainian student, who was able to contribute an invaluable perspective to class discussions.
Adam doesn’t hold back. “I generally like to contribute my opinion about the situation and provide my experience from inside of the country as someone who is living through it,” she says.
She also brought her professional expertise to her Russian Propaganda and Influence class. “I’ve been working on countering Russian disinformation in Ukraine for the last four years,” she explains. “My team trains government employees to detect disinformation and how to respond to it. So, I felt like I both learned a lot, but
also, I could provide a lot of my experience to my cohort.”
Myronenko finds it reassuring that, at the SFS at least, no one has forgotten about the war. “Almost every class is at least somewhat related to politics, and we often talk about the war,” he says. “The professors make sure that people are constantly talking and thinking about Ukraine. It’s incredibly important that we are all educated because it’s not just a war in my country, this conflict affects the entire world.”
As an academic home to some of the world’s preeminent scholars on Russia, Ukraine and international conflict, SFS leaders have shared their insights at campus forums, in the classroom, in the media and during informal calls with the Biden Administration.
A good example is SFS’s Dr. An -
Professors Talmadge (across) and Kupchan (right) spoke at a town hall on February 24, 2022. The next week, Dr. Angela Stent (below) led an SFS panel.
gela Stent. As the former director of Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council, Stent holds a deep understanding of Russia’s role in the global political landscape. Also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of several books on Russian politics, including Putin’s World: Russia Against the West, Stent recently published an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Kremlin’s Grand Delusions: What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Putin’s Regime.”
In March 2022, Stent moderated an SFS-sponsored panel discussion on the war in progress, “Reporting from the Front Lines in Russian and Ukraine,” featuring Jill Dougherty, former CNN Moscow bureau chief and current adjunct professor at SFS and CNN senior national security correspondent Alex Marquardt (SFS ’04). Both had just returned to the United States after covering the start of the war: Dougherty in Russia and Mar -
“As academics we don’t know what’s happening on the ground. But they do come to us to talk about possible intentions, motivations and the history. That’s where we can be helpful.”
quardt from the front lines in Ukraine.
The event attracted a lively crowd and demonstrated how eager SFS students were to learn more about the situation in Ukraine. “They asked some very tough questions. It was impressive,” says Stent.
She pointed out that SFS faculty don’t always agree on policy, and that’s a good thing. “My colleague Charles Kupchan and I don’t disagree profoundly,” Stent says, “but we do
have different views on when Ukraine should negotiate with the Russians. It’s important for the students to see us disagree. To understand the situation, they need to hear more than one point of view. The SFS is very well positioned to provide a variety of voices and recommendations. For students, the media, and the local community,” she adds.
The powers that be in DC also seek out the SFS perspective. “I field calls from the Administration, and I know
I’m not the only member of the SFS faculty they call,” Stent says. “As academics we don’t know what’s happening on the ground. But they do come to us to talk about possible intentions, motivations and the history. That’s where we can be helpful.”
Like Stent, Kupchan is a sought-after commentator and informal advisor to the Administration. Since the war in Ukraine, he has been a regular voice in the media, and his analysis has ap-
peared in influential publications like The New York Times and Foreign Affairs. His most recent book was published in 2020: “Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World.”
Another powerful Georgetown voice, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, has been following the war in Ukraine with growing concern. “This is probably one of the biggest security issues of our time,” she says. “And it is upending the international world order.”
As the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS), and in past roles as the first U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues, special representative for gender at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and chief of staff to the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Verveer has been working on behalf of women in Ukraine for decades.
She also happens to be the granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants, and grew up singing “Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy,” the Ukrainian national anthem, in the hope that Ukraine would one day win its freedom.
Verveer is now using her position to make sure that policy decisions and
relief efforts reflect the specific issues facing Ukrainian women and girls — and to honor the women fighting for freedom in Ukraine.
“Women need to be at the decisionmaking table during times of crisis,” Verveer says. “They are not just victims of war, but also leaders, who often don’t get recognized for the critical role they play. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, many women joined the combat. But they weren’t recognized as official soldiers and
THE GRACIAS FAMILY SUNFLOWER
Current Use Scholarship was established by a $5 million gift from the Gracias Family Foundation, a fund set up by alumni Antonio Gracias (SFS’92, MSFS’93) and Sabrina Kuhl Gracias (B’93). It was designed to provide direct, immediate financial support to current and future Georgetown students affected by the war in Ukraine.
In addition to covering tuition and fees, the scholarship also provides students with emergency funds to pay
for course materials, travel expenses, health insurance, room and board, living expenses and visa expenses.
“This was an important moment,” says Antonio Gracias. “Kids this age get lost during these conflicts. They could get drafted, lose their homes, all kinds of things.
Sabrina and I were talking to Dean Hellman, and we came up with the idea for the scholarship together.”
Dean Hellman and the Gracias family established the scholarship
with incredible speed, just in time to help eight Ukrainian students escape the conflict zone and resume their education.
Four undergraduate and four graduate students received the initial Gracias scholarship in 2022-2023: Kyryl Myronenko (SFS’26) , Olha Kovach ( SFS’26) , Oleksandr Sinhayivskyy (SFS’26) , Tetiana Tkakchenko (SFS’26) , Iryna Adam (SSP’24) , Ruslana Kochmar (MSFS’23) , Juliana Kogan (MASIA’23) and Nikita Makarenko (MSFS’24).
didn’t receive the benefits that accrue to a soldier. Indeed, they were called the ‘invisible battalion.’ Today, that has changed, and women comprise a significant percentage of the security sector, but they had to fight for it.”
In December of 2022, GIWPS presented First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska with the Hillary Rodham Clinton award for her tireless efforts to rally the world to support Ukraine and its struggle for freedom. Zelenska was also recognized for her work in addressing widespread needs related to mental health, domestic violence and humanitarian assistance through her foundation and platforms.
Other awardees included Kateryna Levchenko, government commissioner for gender equality policy; Natalia Karbowska, director on strategic development for the Ukrainian Women’s Fund; and Oleksandra Matviichuk, human rights lawyer and chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
“In giving out the awards, our goal is to tell a story through people’s achievements and leadership,” Verveer says. “We knew we wanted to focus on Ukraine, but also wanted to tell a bigger story about the women’s peace and security agenda, including how sexual violence
Ambassador Melanne Verveer presented First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska with the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award in December 2022.
is being used as a tool of the war. We’re hearing about massive numbers of rapes, kidnappings and other war crimes. We want to send a clear message to the international community that justice needs to be rendered and the perpetrators from Putin on down need to be prosecuted through the courts. In the meantime, the survivors need support, and the crimes need to be documented, so they can be ultimately adjudicated.”
In the last year, GIWPS has also hosted numerous public events and panel discussions on campus featuring high-level policymakers and Ukrainian women leading efforts across humanitarian, human rights and security sectors.
“Today women are involved in all
levels of leadership – security, media, humanitarian affairs and policy. We want to make sure that, when it’s time to start the peace process, women are at that table, too,” Verveer says.
Kupchan believes that one of the greatest assets the SFS provides for its students — Ukrainian or not — is a broad education, grounded in history
“We want to make sure that, when it’s time to start the peace process, women are at that table.”
and comparative politics.
“We’re attempting to teach students how to think conceptually and rigorously across different disciplines,” he says. “So, whether they land in the Foreign Service, the United Nations, the International Crisis Group or CNN, they have the toolkit that they need to operate and excel.”
Stent says the war in Ukraine has made it crystal clear how important those skills are — along with powerful new reasons to acquire them.
“For the Ukrainians, this is an existential question,” she says. “It’s their country. And even though they’re experiencing all these horrible things, their will to fight and their motivation is strong.”
While it’s impossible to predict how long the war will continue, one thing is certain: The SFS will stay engaged for the duration — and be ready for the next international conflict.
SFS student and faculty make themselves part of the solution at COP27
BY ANDREW FAUGHT
As an undergraduate environmental science major in the mid-1990s, Joanna Lewis began having conversations that mostly went unspoken in the public sphere. The planet was warming, the exchanges went, and matters would only worsen without global interventions to stop it.
“I decided this was likely to be the largest issue of my generation, and in those early days, I was starting to think about the solution,” says Lewis, the provost's distinguished associate professor of energy and environment and director of SFS’s Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program.
Lewis’ ensuing graduate studies took her to China, whose coal-based economy — both then and now — make it the world’s largest emitter of climate-warming greenhouse gases. The Chinese were tepid in the face of the young researcher’s concerns.
“I would be introduced to senior energy policy makers, and I’d tell them that I wanted to work on wind and solar energy,” she recalls. “They would sort of laugh in my face and say, ‘China will never do that. These are expensive technologies for wealthy countries.’”
More than two decades later, no one is laughing, as daily headlines attest not only to drought and weather catastrophes wrought by a warming planet, but also to China leading the world in the deployment of wind and solar power. At Georgetown, Lewis is leading a new generation of graduate students to become part of the solution.
From Nov. 6–18, 14 Georgetown students, alumni and staff members traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to participate in the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, the largest gathering of world policymakers who assess and, at times, negotiate agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Lewis has overseen Georgetown’s participation since arriving at the university in 2008.
At COP27, which stands for the “conference of the parties,” the Georgetown contingent observed deliberations and mingled with policymakers. They also hosted a series of side events, including panel discussions and publicizing new research. Some in the group performed a spoken-word event in hopes of making climate challenges personal and emotionally resonant to the gathered leaders.
The conference played host to a broad swath of the Georgetown experience. Attendees represented the School of Foreign Service, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the Georgetown Climate Center, the Earth Commons Institute, the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS).
The Georgetown Climate Center hosted a side event that highlighted how subnational governments — such as local and state policymakers — play important roles in allocating funding and implementing policies that encourage greenhouse gas reduction and improve the quality of life for people in their own communities.
Tweeting on the third to last day of the conference, Kai McGuire (MASIA’24), a 2024 McHenry Fellow enrolled in the Asian Studies program, was ebullient: “Another beautiful day here at #COP27, where the highlight was seeing parties tentatively agree on text to compensate developing countries for #LossAndDamage from climate change. Exciting stuff!”
He was referring to a breakthrough agreement to provide financial assistance to poor countries that are disproportionately affected by the greenhouse gas emissions of richer countries.
McGuire, who previously worked at an international strategic advisory firm that specializes in commercial diplomacy, reported conference doings via Zoom to classmates in his Climate Policy and Diplomacy course. Growing up abroad, McGuire says he’s always been interested in foreign cultures and understanding how parties engage on an international stage.
McGuire left the conference mostly optimistic for the future of the planet, but he also is wary about the “politicization” of climate change.
“I am seeing it increasingly used as a political weapon, especially in the United States,” he says. “There are really strong advocates for climate policy, but there are also really strong detractors of climate policy. That divide threatens the progress that we need to be making to meet our goals and slow the speed of climate change.”
McGuire, who wants to work in international climate diplomacy, says that there was concern among some delegates: “There’s a lot of skepticism around the United States’ commitment to climate change, a sense that the U.S. could pull back at any time,” he says.
The United States did just that in 2017, when President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement, a plan to limit global warming to below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. In 2021, President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the accord. The 2015 Paris Agreement was a seminal COP accomplishment, as the treaty tallied 196 signatories.
Another COP27 attendee, Rebecca Novack (MSFS’23), says the conference “re-sparked my science mindedness.” “The number of researchers at COP was surprising,” says Novack, who got her undergraduate degree in
oceanography and then served five years in the U.S. Navy. “There were a ton of researchers who wanted to present new findings on methane emissions or impacts of permafrost melting. It made me want to learn more about the science behind the policy.”
And she is. Novack, who plans to work to mitigate climate change, says she’s taking courses in nuclear science and technology and geographic information systems this year, because it’s important for policymakers to “really understand the information that they’re receiving, and to make sure that it’s not influenced by lobbyists or companies. It’s important that policymakers have a baseline understanding of the technology that they’re making decisions on.”
The stakes are high. The new “normal” temperature in the United States is 1.7 degrees hotter than it was from 1901-30, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The headlines bespeak the challenges: not only is the country hotter, but it’s wetter in the East and Midwest, and drier and more drought-prone in the West.
The Georgetown Climate Center event included keynote remarks from Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, followed by two panels that included state and local leaders from Maryland, Hawaii, California and Mississippi. Panelists gave insights into programs aimed at modernizing infrastructure, and they described how greenhouse gas reduction benefits can be effectively measured to eliminate harmful emissions.
Panelists also discussed methods to benefit marginalized communities, which are particularly affected by climate change. The EPA reports that Black Americans, for example, are more likely to suffer the impacts of extreme temperatures, flooding and poor air quality.
Solutions included investments that create access to clean drinking water, energy supplies, housing, and low-carbon transportation options.
Kai McGuire (MASIA’24), a 2024 McHenry Fellow, attended the conference and shared his experience on Twitter and with his classmates over Zoom.
Moderators included Kate Zyla, a senior lecturer at Georgetown Law, and executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, whose work focuses on the nexus of climate and energy policy.
For the second year in a row, GIWPS also co-hosted a side event at the conference. The 2022 event, “Climate Security & Agriculture: Strategies for Inclusive Adaptation,” allowed government, nonprofit and international development leaders to discuss the need to include more women’s voices in climate change adaptation efforts, particularly in agrarian communities.
Around the world, four out of five agricultural workers are women, according to Allie Smith, former director of policy advocacy and programming for GIWPS. Droughts, floods and insect infestations have devastated global farmlands, leading to poverty and mass displacements, particularly in areas such as the Horn of Africa.
“That creates all sorts of insecurity dynamics,” Smith says. “Pretty much any social-political-economic issue in the world has a gender aspect to it, and you can’t have a solution to anything while leaving half of the population behind. You can’t ignore the innovation and the skills and the experience of women who have been on the front lines.”
GIWPS Policy and Program Manager Jess Keller helped Smith to put on the event. Smith and Keller also met with GIWPS partners in Egypt, including Patricia Espinosa, the former executive
secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Espinosa has long supported gender equality in international relations.
Two other Georgetown women, Ashanee Kottage (SFS’22) and Caitlin Nasema Cassidy (CAS’11) attended the conference to voice their answers to the pointed query posed by climate activist Greta Thunberg when she asked, “Can you hear me?” Kottage, a postbaccalaureate fellow at the Earth Commons and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, performed before an audience of hundreds along with Cassidy, the first artist-in-residence for Georgetown’s Earth Commons Institute, a hub for environmental and sustainability innovation, research and education.
The pair took part in a three-day Climate Forward program, sponsored by the New York Times. They recited monologues and short stories and prompted the audience to share their stories about special natural places. In their presentations, the women discussed landscapes in their lives that have been affected by climate change.
“We’d ask, ‘Is anybody here thinking about a river? Anybody thinking about mountains, or the ocean?’” Kottage says. “Like 25 to 30 hands went up at a time. People were really hungry to share and tell their stories, and talk about nature and the environment that inspires and drives their work. Especially at these high-level talks like COP27, where there’s so much about numbers and policies and semantics, you can’t forget why you’re here.”
Kottage, who was born and raised in Sri Lanka, says storytelling taps into “ancestral knowledge,” and it provides hope in difficult times. She focuses on “optimistic” stories, such as heat-resistant coral that thrives in the Gulf of Aqaba, at the northern tip of the Red Sea.
“Apocalyptic storytelling makes people want to resign and not do anything, because they think the challenge is too large to tackle,” she says. “There are positive stories, and there are examples of things getting better. It’s important to communicate them, so we can celebrate and learn from successes.”
The inaugural cohort for the Business and Global Affairs major learned firsthand about Gap Inc.’s supply chain by visiting four different cities.
BY JUDI KETTELER
Nima Majidi (SFS’23) can’t pick up a shirt at Gap without thinking about the thousands of miles it has traveled, and the number of people involved in its creation. He thinks about the strategy and design teams at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, the cotton farmers in North Carolina, the factory workers in the Dominican Republic and the distribution center in Nashville.
He knows the path the shirt has traveled because last June, he experienced it firsthand, with 39 other students in the inaugural cohort of the Dikran Izmirlian Program in Business and Global Affairs (BGA) — an interdisciplinary program between the SFS and the McDonough School of Business.
“The idea was to follow a textile product from dirt to shirt,” Majidi says. “The trip was structured like a global supply chain, and it wound up being an incredible experience because of that.”
katrina o’connell (sfs’90), chief Financial Officer for Gap Inc., was instrumental in helping to plan the trip. During the students’ first stop in San Francisco, she and other executives — including Chief Growth Transformation Officer, Sally Gilligan (B’94) — hosted them. Both women received the 2022 William Gaston Alumni Award for their work with BGA. The award is given out annually to undergraduate alumni for extraordinary
leadership and service to Georgetown.
But a different reward came from the SFS students themselves. “We derived so much energy from seeing how engaged the students were in the concepts. They were so good at connecting dots about how things come together,” O’Connell says.
The feeling was mutual. “Everyone in San Francisco was so transparent and willing to answer questions. We learned about how granular everything is, down to how the customs duty is different for different parts of a two-piece set for a baby,” says Lauren Basilico (SFS’23).
If talking to design, budgeting and planning teams gave the students an overview of the complexities of manufacturing and distribution for retail,
their time in North Carolina was all about the material.
“We literally saw how cotton is picked, ginned and spun into yarn. We got to see the factories and the machines firsthand,” Majidi says. The group met directly with farmers, many of whom are running generational family farms.
“We also learned from them about how climate change is impacting their business,” Basilico says.
In Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the group saw a bit of everything. They spoke to labor leaders, witnessed cloth being made into shirts and toured the port where raw materials come in and garments ship out.
“We saw how many people are making their livelihoods as part of the supply chain,” Majidi says.
Because he’s interested in the environmental and human effects of global supply chains, he was particularly interested to see how Gap Inc. is focused on sustainable business practices. In San Francisco, Majidi and his cohort met with the head of human rights operations and learned about the factory scorecards the company uses. In the Dominican Republic, he then had a frame of reference for what that meant, and how practices and policies set thousands of miles away affect real people’s lives.
Before leaving the Dominican Republic, the students got the chance to network with Georgetown alumni who live there, as well as Georgetown graduate students there studying international business and public policy.
The last stop of the trip was Nashville — to learn about distribution and the technology used to sort and ship. “I joked that the AI being used to sort the orders reminded me of ‘the claw’ from Toy Story,” Basilico says.
After the distribution center, they
stopped in at a Gap retail store to close the loop, so to speak. “The number of things that go into just one article of clothing ... all the things that had to happen for you to be holding a white T-shirt: It’s kind of unfathomable,” she says. In a way, that was the point of the trip. To uncover the mechanisms involved in a global supply chain, and to study each piece as it relates to the whole and to the interplay of public and private sectors. Learning about the convergence of policy and business in a global economy is what had drawn Basilico to the BGA program in the first place. “I wanted a skill set to tackle complex problems,” she says, “versus a degree that was too trade specific.” Throughout the whole semester, the students were working on their senior project, which was to design their own retail company with production and distribution based in different countries. The trip helped them marry theoretical with practical — not just what supply chains look like on paper, but also how they actually function — to finish the project. They presented their final projects once back in Washington, DC.
by Rosemary Lane and Anna Broderick
For the first time in over 20 years, two Georgetown scholars have been selected for the Rhodes Scholarship in the same year. Atharv Gupta (SFS’23) and Isabella Turilli (SFS’22) are among only 32 recipients nationwide of the Rhodes Scholarship, a postgraduate award that is widely considered the most prestigious international scholarship program.
The scholarship selects promising young people from around the world who demonstrate integrity, leadership, character, intellect and a commitment to service to study at the University of Oxford. With the
two-year scholarship, Gupta plans to do the M.Sc. in Social Science of the Internet and Turilli plans on the M.Sc. in Public Policy Research.
Both science, technology, and international affairs (STIA) majors in the SFS, Gupta and Turilli have done incredible work in their respective concentrations.
Gupta, a Georgetown senior, Pelosi Scholar and international development researcher working to drive change in emerging markets through technology, sees international development as the key to help drive broadscale change. Through
internships at the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and research at Georgetown, Gupta has already worked on important policy, authoring the U.S. State Department’s first issue paper on Nigeria’s digital economy.
Troy D. Fitrell, the U.S. ambassador to Guinea and the former director of the State Department Office of West African Affairs, was impressed by Gupta’s contributions and said that his paper helped inform U.S. policy on Nigeria’s digital economy in advance of the annual U.S.-Nigeria Bilateral Commission.
“If technology has the
As it turns out, the trip didn’t just benefit the BGA students; it also had an unintended outcome.
“It wasn’t until I helped put the program together that I thought: We should do this for our own people,” O’Connell says. She knows the supply chain intimately, having been with the company for 28 years. “But seeing it through the eyes of the students was really illuminating for many of us,” she says.
For Basilico and Majidi, it was a life-changing experience that they will take with them into their future endeavors. That marriage of international affairs and foreign policy with
That marriage of international affairs and foreign policy with how business happens globally is a unique aspect of the BGA program.
how business happens globally is a unique aspect of the BGA program.
“I chose this major because business, policy and government are inseparable in so many ways,” Majidi says.
He starts his career with a more nuanced understanding gleaned from in-person experiences and conversa-
tions with real people throughout the supply chain. He’ll never forget the trip, he says.
He’ll also never look at a Gap shirt the same way again. It’s not just a garment with sleeves and a hem; it’s a representation of labor, livelihoods and laws.
In Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic the students observed factory workers transform raw materials into complete garments. Credit: Lauren Basilico.
potential to promulgate agency across the world, then my primary question for the Rhodes and Oxford community is where that agency is needed most,” Gupta says. “To surround myself with changemakers who are ‘fighting the world’s fights’ means to surround myself with the most complex problems that humanity faces, to understand where this niche of innovators could make the greatest difference when equipped with the right support.”
After Rhodes, Gupta hopes to build a career in international aid, guiding institutions to embrace the possibil-
ities of technology.
Turilli, a recent graduate from SFS, is now a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations who is working to transform global health diplomacy. On the Hilltop, Turilli studied science, technology, and international affairs with a concentration in biotechnology and global health. Eager to explore outside the classroom, Turilli took on several research positions to immerse herself in health sciences. She discovered its critical intersection with policy along the way.
In 2020, Turilli started working at the Bansal Lab — led by Provost’s
Distinguished Associate Professor Shweta Bansal — where she investigated and co-authored a report on the relationships between climate change, natural disasters and wildlife disease.
At Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, Turilli spent a year working with center director Rebecca Katz coding pandemic preparedness documents for the Health Security Net.
Additionally, Turilli has helped over 200 patients in her time with the Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service (GERMS), a student-run medical
emergency service. Turilli served as one of the only crew chiefs during the pandemic and used her experience on the frontlines and academic studies to write her thesis on global health.
“I am committed to working towards the vision of global health as imagined by the study I dedicate myself to and the communities I’ve learned from,” says Turilli. “Someday, I will ask those same experts about global health governance again. My greatest hope is that their answers will be positive, and that I will have contributed to that improvement.”
Ana Lejava’s (MAERES’23) passion for dance and human rights took her from Georgia to the U.S. and now to Georgetown.
BY CADY STANTON
Growing up in Tbilisi, Georgia, Ana Lejava spent years studying ballet and training to be a professional dancer. At 15 years old, she received a scholarship to dance in the U.S. and later enrolled in undergraduate studies at Birmingham-Southern College, where she found an additional passion rooted in her origins: political science.
“I have always been kind of interested in conflicts — how they start and how they can be solved — because I just have seen a lot of it growing up,” she says.
Despite the challenges of culture
shock in a new country, she graduated with honors and moved to New York City, where she began working as an advisor at the Permanent Representation of Georgia to the United Nations and as an anti-trafficking intern at Human Rights First — all while juggling a role teaching dance on the evenings and weekends.
She went on to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia as a young ambassador to the United States and later combined her passions as Director of Advocacy at Smashworks Dance Collective, a nonprofit promoting women’s rights and social causes through the performing arts and dance.
During the pandemic, she applied to graduate programs with the intention of learning more about the Western perspective on her home region and landed on the Hilltop to get her master’s degree at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies.
While at Georgetown, Lejava has worked as a graduate program assistant at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS), where she has been deeply inspired by GIWPS Executive Director Ambassador Melanne Verveer. She worked to organize the Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Women Leaders Summit with the group last year in what she called a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience meeting influential female leaders.
“All of them have gone through so much to defy all the gender stereotypes and just really opened up barriers to be there. It was quite encouraging to me,” she says.
With the long-term political instability of her home country guiding her interest in international affairs, Lejava hopes to eventually be a part of negotiations to create peace in Georgia.
“I’ve been learning more deeply about the region at-large, understanding Russia better and its security concerns and behavior, which is helping me to become equipped to eventually, maybe one day, go back to Georgia and participate in policymaking there,” she says.
Graduate student Patrick Coe (MASIA’23), has been passionate about foreign policy from a young age.
PATRICK COE’S INTEREST in Asian Studies traces back to a family move to Singapore from Atlanta, Georgia, when he was just two years old. His father’s job working in the beverage industry brought them to Singapore, Shanghai and London — moves that had an outsized impact on his life, Coe says.
“That was definitely a huge influence on me, being able to live in Asia as it was really coming onto the world stage,” he says. “That was kind of where it all started.”
After receiving his bachelor of arts in economics and international relations at Claremont McKenna College, Coe further tapped into his interests as an intern with the Asia Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, where he worked on foreign policy.
Coe’s Master of Arts in Asian Studies thesis focused on how the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to managing the private sector has changed over the last 20 years.
“I want to get a better understanding of the role of China and Asia more
Jazz Jones (SFS’25) finds joy in everything new and novel, and she plans to take that curiosity into the realm of how identities influence culture and political structures.
Jazz Jones loves to get excited about new things: hobbies, courses and high-level concepts alike.
broadly in the global economy in the future: How is it going to coexist with the developed world?” he says. “I’ve really been trying to tailor my education to better understand those dynamics and understand what the relationship will be with us.”
While at Georgetown, Coe served as a graduate student intern for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Capital Markets where he’ll be working full-time in his last semester and after graduation.
“There’s no way I could have done this job without having so many of my classes teach us very thoroughly how to write policy memos on whatever topic and teach us to convey, concisely, very complex issues,” he says.
Coe’s MASIA program cohort is tight-knit and has built traditions including a tally of more than 200 Mahjong games together and a weekly chicken wing night.
Looking forward, he hopes to focus his career on the intersection of economics and foreign policy in Asia, at the U.S. Department of the Treasury —and beyond.
The eldest of seven siblings, Jones is a proud big sister and role model to her brothers and sisters. Her African-American father and Jamaican-Chinese mother gave her early exposure to interweaved cultures, and her family’s frequent moves around Texas and Florida while growing up developed her ability to adapt to new environments quickly, including when coming to the Hilltop. Jones, a culture and politics major and possible Chinese minor, wants to focus her studies on what she calls “diaspora and ownership” — largely how identities outside the state, our units of political structure, may influence politics and other identities.
“What happens when those things mix in ways that our system doesn’t currently account for?” Jones says. “When it comes to culture, we kind of treat it as a given that you own the culture you grew up in. But I feel like we don’t really
question ownership and our ideas of it.”
Her open-mindedness drew her to try out a wide swath of clubs her first year at SFS, until she found a fit as a secretary for The Blaxa, a media group for Black students on campus. She also became a leader for ESCAPE, a transition and reflection program for firstyear students.
Jones is a big fan of Korean popular music, or K-Pop — she even wrote her admissions essay on the genre — and has joined the campus K-Pop performance team. She’s taken up crochet, plays the ukulele and wants to get back into bowling and playing board games with her family in the coming months.
With all of these interests pulling at her attention and time, Jones isn’t ready to close any doors on what she hopes to do after graduation.
“Constantly being a lifelong learner has been something I’ve been thinking fits what I want to do,” she says. “I don’t want to be stagnant … When I find an interest, I’m going to go after it.”
Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (MSFS’04) wraps up three effective terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, rooted in her bipartisan work and dedication to public service.
BY CADY STANTON
Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy’s dedication to service is rooted in the gratitude she’s had for her country from a young age.
Soon after she was born in 1978, Murphy’s parents made the brave decision to flee postwar Vietnam. The family escaped by sea with dozens of other Vietnamese refugees but ran out of fuel in international waters.
A U.S. Navy ship provided them with the supplies they needed to get to a Malaysian camp, setting into motion her family’s relocation to Virginia — and later, a career dedicated to serving her new country and community.
“I grew up really valuing the opportunity to live in the United States, to know what it’s like to live in a free country and in a democracy,” she says. “From an early age, I think my parents really reinforced that, even though life for them in the United States wasn’t easy.” Murphy, who finished her third and last term as a congresswoman in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2023, served on the Ways and Means Committee and was one of only seven Democrats then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi named to the House’s January 6th Committee, investigating the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
“In the six years that I was in Congress — between two impeachments, one insurrection, a global pandemic, an economy teetering on a recession and a ground war in Europe — I was really proud that I worked in a way that enabled me to get a lot done for my constituents and for my country,” she said. Murphy was the first person in her family to attend college when she enrolled as an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary. She then interned for Brent Scowcroft, two-time United States National Security Advisor, who taught her how rewarding public service can be, despite its demands.
Congresswoman Murphy was selected as one of nine representatives to serve on the January 6th Committee.
After a few years working in the private sector, Murphy decided to pivot to public service and enrolled in the MSFS program. From her first day meeting her classmates at MSFS — whom she remembers sharing their incredible careers and global impacts — Murphy found the school both daunting and inspiring.
“It was just an incredibly rich experience to be at MSFS with classmates and professors who had already contributed so much to progress in this world, and to be able to learn from them and to be inspired by them,” she says.
Remaining connected to the school after graduation, Murphy says the quality of her education at Georgetown opened her mind to the importance of being a global citizen and engaging on some of the world’s biggest challenges.
“I think MSFS cultivates people who want to be engaged, and then you find that circle of people who are engaged in interesting issues globally, which tends to be pretty small and pretty full of alumni from the program,” she says.
After graduating, Murphy worked at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service. She later returned to the private sector in Florida, where the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in her community inspired her to run for office.
When she won the race to represent Florida’s 7th Congressional District in 2016 — beating a 12-term incumbent — Murphy became the first Vietnamese-American woman to be elected to Congress.
Of all her accomplishments while working on Capitol Hill, Murphy said she feels most proud of her effective bipartisanship while in office. For example, she led the bipartisan effort to lift the federal gun violence research ban and created the tax benefit that enabled businesses to retain and rehire workers during the pandemic.
A few weeks after the end of her time in the House, Murphy hadn’t decided on her next steps aside from focusing on spending time with her fam-
“I grew up really valuing the opportunity to live in the United States, to know what it’s like to live in a free country.”
ily, including her two young children. She’s looking to continue contributing to her community in the private sector, nonprofit space, or otherwise.
“It’s important we have good people who step up and who work for whatever amount of time works for them in their lives and the mission at hand, because public service is important and rewarding,” she said.
A chance with GUTV led to an award-winning international broadcast journalism career for Alex Marquardt (SFS’04) whose latest assignment has him covering the ravages of theWar in Ukraine.
BY SUSIE FRANK
The SFS alumnus reports on international affairs and national security from the U.S. and abroad.
Emmy-award-wnnning journalist Alex Marquardt jokes that he has only one regret about his time at the SFS: “I should have taken Russian and Arabic, instead of Italian.”
How could he have known that one day he would be on the ground covering some of the most dangerous international conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe?
As the foreign correspondent for ABC News based in Moscow, Jerusalem, Beirut and London, he reported from the front lines of multiple conflicts in the Middle East, the refugee and migrant crisis and the wave of terror attacks across Europe. He was in Ukraine when Russia invaded in both 2014 and 2022.
Before his international posts, Marquardt was an “embed” reporter
with CNN during the 2008 presidential election. He has won Emmy, Edward R. Murrow and Gracie awards, notably for an undercover investigation of underage sex trafficking in the Philippines. He is now based in DC, reporting on foreign policy as CNN’s senior national security correspondent.
Marquardt was born in Bahrain and spent the first five years of his life in the Middle East. He spent the rest of his childhood in Luxembourg and Belgium, but always maintained a strong connection to the States.
“My siblings and I were brought up as American expat kids who spoke English at home, and we would go back to the States every summer to see family. I always knew I would attend college in the U.S.,” he says.
He also aspired to continue his international education. “I definitely wanted a school that had a strong international student body, an emphasis on international studies and nice campus life alongside being in a city. As soon as I stepped foot on the Georgetown campus, I knew that I really wanted to go there,” he recalls.
Marquardt didn’t get in the first time he applied to the SFS, but he persevered. “I was really set on Georgetown. I got in on my second try, and never looked back,” he says.
He came to journalism gradually. “It was a completely chance encounter with GUTV, the campus TV station, that got me thinking about journalism. I joined GUTV sophomore year, right when 9/11 happened. And that really sparked my interest in the media.”
His first job was working in the NBC page program, and then for the Today Show, where he got a taste of what it might be like to cover breaking international news.
“I was at the Today Show when the seven bombs exploded in London. Watching the NBC News staff respond, watching the anchor, Lester Holt, spring into action, I was finally sure I wanted to be a journalist.”
Marquardt would soon get his chance to spring into action, covering
“This poor man, whose house had been turned to rubble, was sifting through the debris, looking for his belongings. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’d ever seen.
he convinced his editors to send him. He arrived two weeks before the invasion, and knew it was likely coming, but the actual day was still a shock.
“I spent a day with a middle-aged man on the outskirts of Kyiv, who had just lost five family members and a family friend. This poor man, whose house had been turned to rubble, was sifting through the debris, looking for his belongings. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’d ever seen,” he recalls.
conflicts all over the world — and put his SFS experience to work.
“The SFS put an academic framing around what I had seen and felt growing up overseas and helped me understand the world more clearly going forward,” he says. “It put me in classrooms with brilliant professors who had lived a lot of the issues we studied, who had worked in a lot of the governments we discussed.”
Marquardt had been back in the States almost six years when the latest conflict in Ukraine started bubbling up in 2022. The newsroom was not planning to post him back to Ukraine, but
Although his work takes him to far-flung places, Marquardt has always made an effort to stay close to Georgetown.
“No matter where I was stationed, I would interview prospective students and help out with the admissions process, because I wanted Georgetown to get the best students out there,” he says. “And I really wanted people who might not necessarily think they could go to such a great school to have that opportunity.”
It’s an opportunity he still appreciates. As he says: “I wonder all the time, ‘Where would I be had I not been at the SFS? Had I not worked at GUTV? Had I not met the people that I came across at Georgetown?’”
In his new book, SFS Professor Abraham Newman explores manipulating global networks as a foreign policy approach.
BY JUDI KETTELER
As a professor at SFS and in the government department, Abraham Newman spends a lot of time thinking about how the domestic and the international blur. People tend to segment them, putting the economy over here and national security over there.
But in reality, they are closely intertwined and have important consequences for each other. Not only that, but their interdependence can also be manipulated — weaponized — to deal with bad actors on the global stage.
It’s all laid out in his newest book, co-authored with Johns Hopkins professor of international affairs Henry Farrell. “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” (Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2023), hits shelves in September 2023. Newman and Farrell have been writing about weaponized interdependence since 2019. Much of their earlier work was focused on relations with Iran and North Korea, and how the U.S. used these global economic levers, not military might, most successfully.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, he and Farrell again laid out the argument in a New York Times opinion piece. Weaponized interdependence, they explained, was about seizing the economic chokepoints, such as the dollar clearing system, so that Russia wouldn’t be able to do international business.
“How the U.S. used to use sanctions was to say to a country like Cuba or Iran, ‘You can’t have access to our market,’” Newman explains from Germany, where he is living during a sabbatical year. “The difference now is that there are global networks, and the U.S. is trying to manipulate them to affect foreign policy — which they can do because of chokepoints.”
And of course, the economic and foreign policy chess game has only intensified in the past several years. So, does that mean weaponized interde -
pendence should also intensify?
“If used too much, it could be a bad thing,” Newman says. “What Henry and I argue is that it’s a powerful tool and should be used judiciously. We need to have some rules of the road.”
Newman started his career thinking about data privacy in a global economy. That led to his first book, “Protectors of Privacy: Regulating Personal Data in the Global Economy” (Cornell University Press, 2008). He followed up with “Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security” (Princeton University Press, 2019), which was also co-authored with Farrell. That’s when they began thinking about the overlap between economy and security.
Newman jokes that he abides by the “Virginia Woolf style of professional
development.” In other words, he says, you trip over one thing, which leads you to another thing that gets you excited.
This fluid, curiosity-driven approach started at Stanford as an undergrad, when he took a class about Germany through the eyes of artists. The class read German novels and studied
“I’m always struck by the little things — how some conversation I have with a local over a beer can stoke an idea.”
Professor Newman researches the connections between national security and economic policy, including the role of sanctions in international affairs.
visual representations of things like reckoning with the Holocaust and German reunification. It got him interested in studying German, and eventually he did a study abroad program in Germany. When he was awarded a Fulbright after college, he decided to study the politics of far-right extremism.
Then, doing his Ph.D. in political science at UC Berkeley in the late 1990s, he found himself living in the heart of the dot-com boom.
“It was all around you there in Silicon Valley,” he says. “It was a very fizzy period of economic development around information technology.” He wondered, what were the rules that would govern it, especially at an international scale?
In a way, he’s come full circle, having spent the 2022–2023 academic year in Germany. His husband, a professor at Johns Hopkins, also secured a sabbatical. They were able to bring their two daughters, ages 9 and 12, and even their dog, River. Being in Europe reminds him of how important it is to get out of the classroom and interact with the world.
“I’m always struck by the little things — how a conversation I have with a local over a beer can stoke an idea,” he says. While the year has been fantastic for his family, he’s eager to get back to teaching, especially the proseminar, the 15-person class required for all first-year undergraduate students in the SFS. It trains them in the academic reading and writing skills they’ll need for their college career.
“I love that class,” he says. “It’s a crown jewel of the program.”
Newman has been at SFS since 2006, and he admits that he was a bit nervous coming to Georgetown at first.
“I’m a gay, Jewish boy from Columbus, Ohio, and I didn’t know what to expect,” he says.
But he cherishes the experiences he’s had here, and how the Jesuit values have created a sense of inclusiveness and a home. “I’ve been so happy to be at a school that has a set of guiding principles that are about taking care of the whole person.”
BY ANDREW FAUGHT
When Marwa Daoudy joined SFS in 2014, she was one of the few scholars at the school teaching a course linking climate change to international security. Her Environmental Security and Conflict course drew students from a range of academic disciplines and units throughout SFS.
“There was a realization that this was a way of bringing students and faculty from across the university around that important topic,” says Daoudy, associate professor of international relations and the Seif Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies.
Georgetown, with Daoudy as a leading international voice on the geopolitical hazards of climate change, continues to play an important role in the discussion, as nations sometimes pursue self-serving and conflicting narratives. That, Daoudy notes, can lead to false interpretations and analyses that hamper progress. Rigorous research is important so that policymakers have all of the facts going forward, she says.
Daoudy was one of 65 scientists who contributed to “A Year of Climate Science in Review,” a 48-page treatise that focused on the limits of humankind to adapt to increasing droughts, storms and floods. The document (published by the organizations Future Earth, The Earth League and World Climate Research Programme) was presented on November 10, 2022, to delegates attending COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the largest single gathering of policymakers considering the role of climate
change to the future of the planet.
Among the scientists’ proposals was a call for a “loss and damage” fund, in which rich countries — often the world’s biggest emitters of harmful greenhouse gases — would compensate smaller countries for bearing disproportionate effects of climate change. Delegates heeded the call, taking the groundbreaking step of creating a dedicated fund to help affected countries respond to loss and damage.
Daoudy called the action “a major breakthrough for better climate justice, although much more needs to be done.” Other report recommendations included identifying “vulnerability hot spots,” areas with the highest susceptibility to being adversely affected by climate-driven hazards. Daoudy and her colleagues singled out Central America, the Sahel, Central and East Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia. Researchers, meantime, questioned “the myth of endless adaptation.” “The potential to adapt to climate change is not limitless,” the authors wrote. “Hence, adaptation efforts cannot substitute for ambitious mitigation.”
“We need to be part of this global issue, and that’s why as researchers we are bringing awareness to policymakers, telling them about the compounded impacts of climate change and how alarming the situation is,” Daoudy says. “Many of them realize that, but research gives them something solid to rely on, to bring back to their constituency. What’s at stake here is existential — our survival and the survival of future generations.”
Daoudy has written widely on the toll of a warming planet on lives and livelihoods. Her book, “The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security” (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Prize from the International Studies Association, which recognizes the best publications in the field of environmental studies. She analyzes the human, environmental and security impacts of climate change, with a focus on the Middle East.
“We are bringing awareness to policymakers, telling them about the compounded impacts of climate change and how alarming the situation is.”
itics. Her doctoral dissertation was on the power and security dynamics surrounding transboundary water shared among Syria, Turkey and Iraq. “Later on, as we became more aware of climate change, I started my research to look into the many impacts that affect already vulnerable societies and populations,” she says. Daoudy is now at work on a new book, due in 2024, that will give an expanded picture of climate security in the Middle East and North Africa.
Government mismanagement of climate change, Daoudy writes, compounds challenges and leads to “human insecurity,” such as the weaponization of water resources and infrastructures by state and non-state actors and a surge in “climate-induced migration.”
At SFS, Daoudy teaches several courses that parse out those topics: Critical Human and Environmental Security, Environmental Security and Conflict and The Politics of Water.
Several of her students have gone on to do climate-related work for the U.S. State Department and NGOs, while others are following Daoudy’s footsteps as researchers and teachers.
The Syrian-born Daoudy has long been interested in environmental pol-
At Georgetown, she is among 100 professors from a range of disciplines who are dedicated to “the broadening of environment education, conservation and public salience.” Their efforts — in the form of scholarship, teaching and leadership — are organized under Georgetown’s Earth Commons Institute, which works to develop solutions for a “greener, more sustainable world.”
“There are lots of narratives going around, from climate change skepticism to overly deterministic links made between climate-induced migration and instability,” Daoudy says, “but the best way to counter that is to publish rigorous academic research and policy reports, and to show the concrete impacts on daily life shared by populations around the world.”
Dr. Mohammad AlAhmad, assistant teaching professor with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, published “The Relationship Between Metaphor And Aesthetic Experience in Poetry.” Featured in the 2022 Winter/ Spring CCAS Newsmagazine, the book posits “that works of art involve two experiences: that of the aesthetic reception of the subject matter and that of creativity. It attempts to expose the relationship between these two experiences and asks how the aesthetic experience manifests in the metaphor of the text.”
Dr. John McNeill, distinguished university professor at SFS and the history department, co-authors a story of the movement of peoples with the ecological mixing of plants, animals, and microbes in the Caribbean. “Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean” follows the environmental transformations that spanned from the arrival of the first human populations some 7,000 years ago, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, to the modern era with its rapid currents of biological exchange.
Dr. Jacques Berlinerblau, Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization at SFS, comes together with Dr. Terrence Johnson to investigate AfricanAmerican and Jewish-American relations in “Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue.” The book opens up a space for discussion on the intersection of these two groups, both targeted by white supremacy, and the history of the Black-Jewish relationship.
Dr. Emily Mendenhall, medical anthropologist and SFS professor, used her personal experiences about her northwest Iowa hometown, Okoboji, and her expertise to explain how American cultural phenomena clashed with official public health guidance in the COVID outbreak that Okoboji experienced in the summer of 2020. “Unmasked: Covid, Community, and the Case of Okoboji” is a case study of how state political action, public health negotiation and community disbelief can impact the lives and livelihood of America.
Dr. Jonathan Brown, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at SFS, examines the claim that Islam is foundationally antiBlack in his book “Islam and Blackness.” Brown investigates the relationship between Islam and Blackness and shows how Islamic scripture, law, and Sufism intertwine with historical lived experiences of Muslims inside and outside of Africa.
Dr. Ben Buchanan and Dr. Andrew Imbrie, Director of Technology and National Security at the National Security Council in the White House and associate professor of the practice in the Gracias Chair in Security and Emerging Technology at SFS, respectively, show AI’s revolution and its unlimited potential to advance democracy in “The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI.” Combining their backgrounds, Buchanan and Imbrie weave together a story of how AI can be used as a force for good.
Dr. Paul Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs at SFS, uses his expertise in the classroom and public service to portray the evolution and dangers of Christian nationalism. “The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism” clearly distinguishes how patriotism differs from the dangerous ideology of Christian nationalism.
Dr. Irfan Nooruddin, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Indian Politics, presents a new theory on reasons behind rising American alt-right attitudes in his co-authored “The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics.” Nooruddin uses historical analysis and extensive research on Christian nationalist views of what it means to be American, stances on immigration, foreign policy and domestic leadership.
Dr. Daniel Byman’s “Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism” presents a compelling account on the evolution of the white power movement in the United States and the global risk white supremacist terrorism poses. An expert on terrorism, and former U.S. government analyst and staff member on the 9/11 Commission, Byman provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of an important threat to the U.S. and Europe.
Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu, associate professor in the African Studies Program, presents an ethnography of a community of self-identified effeminate men, known as sasso, in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. “Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana” simultaneously disrupts claims of neoliberal Ghana as a homophobic and heterosexual place while showing the community that the sasso have created together.
Dr. Michael Green, Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at SFS, provides a comprehensive narrative of Japan’s strategic thinking and their dominant role in East Asia and globally in “Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzoˉ .” Green analyzes Japan’s new active role, and implications for future foreign policy and interaction in Asia and the United States.
Dr. Joseph Sassoon, professor of history and political economy at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, published a book that focuses on his family, the Sassoons, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the 19th and 20th centuries. The generational saga of success, and eventual decline, is highlighted in “The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire.”
Dr. Elizabeth Grimm, associate teaching professor in the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at SFS, provides an analysis of religious terrorist groups and expert insight on terrorist leadership transition. Co-authored with Dr. Tricia Bacon, Grimm argues that the positioning of the successors of a terrorist group, in relation to the founder, shapes the future of that group. “Terror in Transition: Leadership and Succession in Terrorist Organizations” provides actionable recommendations for counterterrorism policy.
Dr. Ori Z Soltes, teaching professor at the Center for Jewish Civilization, writes a comprehensive biography of Fethullah Gülen, the renowned Turkish Islamic scholar and cleric whose work for education and peace inspired the Hizmet movement, in “Between Thought and Action: An Intellectual Biography of Fethullah Gülen.”
Dr. Robert Lieber, professor emeritus of government and international affairs and foreign policy expert, argues that the U.S. is a critical presence in the postwar liberal order. The U.S.’s role in the international system is incredibly important, but what is that role, and what is America not doing that it should do? In “Indispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in a Turbulent World,” Lieber analyzes the stability and influence that the U.S. has as a global leader in comparison to revisionist powers, and the unique position it has.
Dr. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen, teaching professor in the Asian Studies Program, presents a critical feminist ethnography of the voices of Dalit Tamil women. The perspectives of the women, who are disproportionately affected by breast and cervical cancer, are highlighted in “Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India.”
Above: Keynote speaker and MSFS alumnus
His Majesty King Felipe VI of Spain (MSFS’95), continued the weekend’s centennial celebrations at the gala dinner. Middle: Students, alumni, faculty and guests gathered to commemorate the 100th anniversary of MSFS.
Bottom: The MSFS Centennial Awards honored six alumni, nominated by their peers, whose life and work embody the MSFS program’s core values.
DECEMBER 2, 2022
To commemorate its 100th anniversary, Georgetown’s Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program held a Centennial Gala Dinner at the United States Institute of Peace in December 2022 — complete with a host of distinguished speakers, guests and the presentation of the prestigious MSFS Centennial Awards.
His Majesty King Felipe VI of Spain (MSFS’95) was the keynote speaker at the gala, where he reflected on the ways public service is central to the MSFS program.
“Public service is about caring for the greater good [and] desiring to address common challenges,” he said. “The program we are celebrating today is a master’s in foreign service. So much of a life well lived is about service, about working with and for others, and about making life slightly better for those around us.”
Ambassador Donald F. McHenry (PHD’64) presented the Centennial Awards to six distinguished MSFS alumni thought to have best embodied the program’s guiding principles of leadership, creativity, ethics, service and inclusion.
Recipients included Ragnheiður Elín Árnadóttir (MSFS’94), Ambassador Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat (MSFS’80), Raja Karthikeya Gundu (MSFS’09), the late Paula Gene Loyd (MSFS’04), Michael Samway (MSFS’91) and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca (MSFS’97). Together, the awardees carry a wealth of diverse experiences, having worked everywhere from the Icelandic parliament to the U.S. Army and Diplomatic Corps.
Sylvia Yacoub (MPP’23, MSFS’23), a finalist on NBC’s The Voice, closed out the evening with a stirring performance before attendees retired to the dance floor.
Above: Generous sponsors supported the gala and raised nearly $320,000 for MSFS scholarships and programs. Left: After the awards presentation and speeches, former The Voice contestant Sylvia Yacoub (MSFS’23) performed her rendition of Andra Day’s “Rise Up.”
Top Right: MSFS Deputy Director Ashley Lenihan (SFS’00, PhD’09) recognized the generous sponsors whose contributions made the evening possible.
Bottom Right: Following the gala dinner and Yacoub’s performance, guests took to the dance floor and closed out the evening’s festivities.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2022
To celebrate the late U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright’s incredible legacy, Georgetown held a two-day symposium honoring Secretary Albright’s life and work, with contributions from some of the most important voices in foreign policy today.
Friends and colleagues of Albright offered heartfelt reflections, including diplomats U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Bill Clinton (SFS’68)
“Madeleine felt strongly about a lot of things,” Secretary Clinton remarked. “She stood up for herself. She took on generals, both ours and others, if she thought she was right, or she didn’t think people were analyzing a problem correctly. There was no shortage of real passion and determination.”
One panel brought together three former foreign ministers — Israel’s Tzipi Livni, El Salvador’s Mayu Ávila and Sweden’s Margot Wallström — who recounted their experiences working as Albright’s close colleagues through the Aspen Ministers Forum.
In a panel on Albright’s academic work, foreign policy scholars and professors from universities Albright was affiliated with G. John Ikenberry, Stacie Goddard, Deborah Avant, Angela Stent and moderator Elizabeth Saunders reflected on Secretary Albright’s nearly 40-year legacy at SFS. A beloved professor, Albright brought her wealth of experience to her American National Security Toolbox class.
In the spirit of Albright’s course, SFS hosted an academic competition on the second day of the symposium. The event featured a crisis simulation where students were challenged to act as the United States, Russia, Japan, India or China in a mock scenario on growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait. A team of students representing Georgetown MASIA’s 2023 Cohort emerged from the championship round as this year’s winners.
“She stood up for herself. She took on generals, both ours and others, if she thought she was right, or she didn’t think people were analyzing a problem correctly.”
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
Distinguished guests included Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman, who spoke at the symposium and participated in a panel conversation.
Elizabeth Saunders moderated a panel with G. John Ikenberry, Stacie Goddard, Deborah Avant and Angela Stent on Albright’s Academic Legacy.
Edward Luce moderated a conversation with members of Albright’s Aspen Ministers, featuring Mayu Ávila, Tzipi Livni and Margot Wallström.
President Bill Clinton greeted attendees and spoke alongside his wife Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton with Ambassador Melanne Verveer.
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield joined Ambassador Melanne Verveer and Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman for a conversation on following in Albright’s footsteps.
The symposium was sponsored by the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Aspen Ministers Forum, hosting hundreds of attendees.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken Congratulates the SFS Class of 2022 as Commencement Speaker MAY 21, 2022
In the first on-campus graduation weekend since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken commended the SFS Class of 2022 for their courage and delivered stirring remarks as the Commencement speaker. “I know this has not been an easy road,” he said. “But you have traveled it together and you have done so while practicing the core principle of cura personalis.” Closing out his speech by highlighting the importance of a life in service to others, Blinken told the audience: “We welcome you with open arms to the ranks of the doers. And we can’t wait to see all that you will get done.”
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva Highlights Need for Greater Global Economic Cooperation in a “World with More Fragility” at SFS Event
OCTOBER 6, 2022
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva joined SFS Dean Joel Hellman for a conversation focused on identifying policy priorities during heightened global economic uncertainty. Georgieva’s remarks served as the curtain raiser speech for the World Bank and IMF’s annual meetings. She warned that “We are [moving] … from a world of relative predictability — with a rules-based framework for international economic cooperation, low interest rates and low inflation — to a world with more fragility” and affirmed the IMF’s commitment to helping countries minimize financial risks.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan Unveils Biden’s National Security Strategy on the Hilltop OCTOBER 13, 2022
In an event co-hosted by the Center for a New American Security, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan presented the Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy on the Hilltop, placing emphasis on geopolitical competition and countering threats from China and Russia. He emphasized three major U.S. goals from the NSS: ambitious national investment, ranging broadly from clean energy to cybersecurity; coalition-building through multilateral alliances; and shaping the “rules of the road” in the rapidly evolving spaces of “foundational technologies, cyberspace, and trade and investment.”
Women Rising: A Conversation with Diane von Fürstenberg NOVEMBER 9, 2022
A trailblazer in women’s rights, the fashion industry and philanthropy, SFS hosted Diane von Fürstenberg for a discussion on the critical roles women play in defending democracy and how we can magnify their impact around the world. Von Fürstenberg was joined by GIWPS’ Amb. Melanne Verveer and Georgetown students Bahar Ghandehari (CAS’23), Olha Kovach (SFS’26) and Salma Alokozai (GHD’24) from Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan, respectively — each of whom highlighted the differentiated impacts of violent conflict on women and girls in their respective countries.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Georgetown Honor HRH
The Countess of Wessex, Ukraine’s First Lady and Women’s Rights Trailblazers
DECEMBER 5, 2022
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security (GIWPS) hosted the 2022 Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards ceremony, which honors women leaders who demonstrate exceptional leadership in advancing women’s rights. This year, a number of the awardees’ work focuses on the conflict in Ukraine and centers the participation of women in recovery and peace processes. Five trailblazers were honored at the annual ceremony: the First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska; HRH The Countess of Wessex; Kateryna Levchenko, government commissioner for gender equality policy; Natalia Karbowska, director on strategic development for the Ukrainian Women’s Fund; and Oleksandra Matviychuk, human rights lawyer and chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte Calls for Russia to Be Held Accountable for Acts in Ukraine at SFS Event
JANUARY 17, 2023
In collaboration with the Atlantic Council, SFS hosted Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte for a conversation on the
need for transatlantic cooperation to address rising global challenges — among them, responding to Russian aggression and providing military support to Ukraine. Rutte also discussed accountability in prosecuting the war. “The Hague is the international city of peace and justice,” Rutte remarked. “I could not accept that we would let this go by unpunished.”
Institute for the Study of Diplomacy Honors CIA Director
Ambassador William J. Burns with 2022 Trainor Award
FEBRUARY 2, 2023
SFS and the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy presented the 2022 Trainor Award to Ambassador William J. Burns, recognizing his groundbreaking work as a former U.S. diplomat and Deputy Secretary of State. Burns’ career in the U.S. Foreign Service took him to the forefront of some of the greatest foreign policy challenges in modern history — among them, leading successful back-channel negotiations that culminated in the Iran nuclear deal and convincing Muammar Gaddafi to pursue Libyan disarmament.
Secretary Gina Raimondo on the CHIPS Act and a LongTerm Vision for America’s Technological Leadership
FEBRUARY 23, 2023
Hosted by SFS and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo delivered remarks on the importance of reinvesting in American semiconductors in order to compete in the global economy. She emphasized that, “The research, innovation and manufacturing sparked by [the CHIPS Act] will enable the United States to be a technological superpower, securing our economic and national security for the next generation.” Sec. Raimondo also fielded questions from students, on topics ranging from how the CHIPS Act will affect international trade to what impact government subsidies will have on the competitive market.
U.S. Representative to the United Nations Amb. Linda Thomas-Greenfield Receives 2023 Trainor Award
MARCH 14, 2023
The 40th recipient of the award, SFS and ISD honored Ambassador Linda ThomasGreenfield for her trailblazing 35-year career as a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. Amb. Barbara Bodine, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, opened the event and highlighted ThomasGreenfield’s impressive legacy as the former U.S. ambassador to Liberia and previous Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. In the conversation that followed, Thomas-Greenfield and Anne Anderson, the former Ambassador of Ireland to the U.S., discussed diplomacy’s role in the struggle for human rights.
Women at the Helm: The Unfinished Business of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement
MARCH 16, 2023
On the 25th anniversary of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement, GIWPS hosted two panels centered around the overlooked, yet influential, role of women in negotiating the agreement. The event featured Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Taoiseach of Ireland Leo Varadkar, former Irish president Mary Robinson, and leading women negotiators, elected officials, civil servants from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland and the United States. The speakers reflected on the stories of women involved in critical peacemaking processes and the role of civil society in shaping the future of the region.
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