Advisory Board

George Shambaugh, Chair

George Shambaugh is a professor of international affairs and government in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and former chair of the Department of Government. His research and teaching focus on topics of international politics, foreign policy, international political economy, and the environment. He is the author of Oracles, Heroes or Villains: Economic Policymakers, National Politicians and the Power to Shape Markets; and States, Firms, and Power: Successful Sanctions in United States Foreign Policy.

Thomas Banchoff

Thomas Banchoff is the vice president for global engagement and a professor in the Department of Government and Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a current senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he served as founding director from 2006 to 2017. His scholarship centers on ethical and religious issues in world politics. His written and edited works include The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges; Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies; Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights; and Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics

Matthew Carnes, SJ

Matthew Carnes is an associate professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service, and he currently serves as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies. His research examines the dynamics of labor and social welfare policy in developing and middle-income countries. He is the author of Continuity Despite Change: The Politics of Labor Regulation in Latin America, and his research has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, and Latin American Research Review, among others. He is the recipient of three Georgetown University teaching awards.

Christopher S. Celenza

Christopher S. Celenza is the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He previously served as the provost for faculty affairs and vice dean for humanities and social sciences at Johns Hopkins and as the director of the American Academy in Rome. His scholarship and teaching centers on Italian Renaissance history, postclassical Latin literature and philosophy, and the history of classical scholarship. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than forty scholarly articles. His most recent works include The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning; Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer; and Machiavelli: A Portrait.

Maureen Corriagan

Maureen Corrigan is the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism. She is also the longtime book critic for the Peabody Award–winning NPR program Fresh Air. She also writes regularly for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. In 2019, she was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her book So We Read On: How Came to Be and Why It Endures was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2014. Her literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading was published in 2005. She was the associate editor of and contributor to the two-volume essay collection Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner), which won the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. She served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and she also serves on the Advisory Board of the American Writers Museum (as well as appearing in one of the permanent exhibitions). She has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges’ panel of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and served on the Advisory Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary

E. J. Dionne Jr.

E. J. Dionne Jr. is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post, and University Professor of the Foundations of Democracy and Culture. He has been named among the twenty-five most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or coauthor of eight books, including One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported; Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond; and Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent. His most recent book is Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.

Harriette Hemmasi

Harriette Hemmasi is the dean of the library. Before coming to Georgetown, she served as the university librarian at Brown University, the executive associate dean at Indiana University, and the associate university librarian for technical and automated services at Rutgers University. She began her library career as a music librarian at Rutgers after receiving a master’s in library and information science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in music from Indiana University. Her leadership focuses on advocating for and advancing the role of the library through its use of digital tools and methodologies to enhance access, use, dissemination, and preservation of all forms of scholarly communication in support of established and emerging approaches to teaching, learning, and research.

LaMonda Horton Stallings

LaMonda Horton-Stallings is a professor of African American studies. Her research fields and teaching interests address concerns of gender, class, and sexual inequity. She is the author of A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (2019); Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (2015); and Mutha’ is Half a Word! Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (2007). She received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association. She was a 2016 finalist for the Twenty-Eighth Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Studies. 

Lise Howard

Lise Howard is an associate professor in the Department of Government, where she is the international relations field chair. She was also the founding director of the Master’s Program in Conflict Resolution and has served as a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Her research and teaching spans international relations, comparative politics, and conflict resolution with a focus on civil wars, peacekeeping, US foreign policy, and area studies of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Her publications include UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars and Power in Peacekeeping, as well as articles in such journals as International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Peacekeeping, and Foreign Affairs.

Maurice Jackson

Maurice Jackson is an associate professor of history and African American studies and an affiliated professor of performing arts. He was appointed as the first chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs and serves as special adviser on DC affairs to Georgetown University’s president. His scholarship centers on the Atlantic World and African American history and culture. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. He is the coeditor of African Americans and the Haitian Revolution; of Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808; and of DC Jazz. He is at work on Halfway to Freedom: African Americans and the Struggle for Social Progress in Washington, DC.

Jane Levey

Jane Levey is the consulting curator at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, and managing editor for Washington History.

Jane McAuliffe

Jane McAuliffe is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Her previous positions include director of national and international outreach at the Library of Congress, president of Bryn Mawr College, and dean of arts and sciences at Georgetown University. She has published Qur’anic Christians (1991); ?Abbasid Authority Affirmed (1995); With Reverence for the Word (2002); Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (6 vols and online, 2006); The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an (2006); The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Islam (2015); The Qur’an: A Norton Critical Edition (2017); and The Qur’an: What Everyone Needs to Know (2020). She is past president of the American Academy of Religion and a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations, Scholars Council of the Library of Congress, and Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants.

John McNeill

John McNeill is a University Professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History. His writing and teaching focus on world history, environmental history, and international history. He is the author of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945; Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1640–1914; The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History; and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. His articles have appeared in journals such as Environmental History, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Earth-Science Reviews.

Lourdes Ortega

Lourdes Ortega is a professor in the Department of Linguistics. Her research focuses on adult language learning in classroom settings. She is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of second-language instruction in 2000; for her best-selling textbook, Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016); and for championing a social justice turn in the study of multilingualism. She is coeditor of The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism and author of more than eighty other scholarly publications. Her awards include Spencer and Mellon fellowships, as well as Georgetown University’s Gerald M. Mara Faculty Mentoring Award in 2016. She is a past editor of the journal Language Learning and will be president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2024.

Peter C. Pfeiffer

Peter C. Pfeiffer is a professor in and the chair of the Department of German and director of the European Studies Certificate Program. His main areas of research are nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary history. His published works include Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Tragödie, Erzählung, Heimatfilm; and Aphorismus und Romanstruktur: Zu Musils 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' as well as articles in such journals as Die Unterrichtspraxis/Learning German, Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, and Zeitschrift für Germanistik und Literatur.

Nicoletta Pireddu

Nicoletta Pireddu is a professor in the Department of Italian, core member of the Comparative Literature Program, and director of Georgetown Humanities. She received Georgetown University’s FLL Distinguished Service Award (2017) and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2005). Her written and edited works include Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories; the first English translation of Scipio Sighele’s The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society; The Works of Claudio Magris: Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders; and more than seventy articles in journals such as Comparative Literature, Romanic Review, and the Journal of European Studies.

Cristina Sanz

Cristina Sanz is a professor of Spanish and linguistics; director of the intensive and School of Foreign Service Spanish programs and the Barcelona Summer Program; and coordinator of the Catalan Lectureship. Her areas of expertise are linguistics, technology for pedagogy, multilingualism, Catalan, and Spanish. She is a recipient of the 2019 President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers and has published more than ninety volumes, articles, and chapters in journals such as the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, PLOS ONE, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Language Learning, and Applied Psycholinguistics. Her recent books include The Routledge Handbook of Study Abroad Research and Practice and Individual Differences, L2 Development, and Language Program Administration. Her book Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition received the Modern Language Association’s Mildenberger Award.

Mark Stout

Mark Stout is a senior lecturer with Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs, for which he directs the master’s program in global security studies. A former intelligence officer for the US Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, he has also worked for the US Army and the Institute for Defense Analyses in nonintelligence capacities. In addition, he was the historian at the International Spy Museum for three years. He is a senior editor at War on the Rocks and was the founding president of the North American Society for Intelligence History. He is coeditor of the Studies in Intelligence History series from Georgetown University Press. Most recently, he was a coeditor of the two-volume Spy Chiefs. His research interests include US intelligence history, irregular warfare, and military thought.

Deborah Tannen

Deborah Tannen is a University Professor in the Department of Linguistics. Her research addresses how people use language in everyday conversation to create meaning and negotiate relationships. She has been the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University; has twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and is associate editor of Language in Society. In addition to seventeen academic books and more than one hundred scholarly articles, she has written eight books for general audiences, including three New York Times bestsellers: You Just Don’t Understand, about conversations between women and men; You’re Wearing THAT?, about mothers and grown daughters; and You Were Always Mom’s Favorite, about sisters. Her most recent book is You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships.

Jeffrey Urbach

Jeffrey Urbach received his PhD in physics at Stanford University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the physics department at Georgetown University as an assistant professor in 1996 and was promoted to professor of physics in 2006. He served as chair of the physics department for a total of 8 years, and was the co-director of the Program on Science in the Public Interest from its founding in 2006 until 2011, and as the director of the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology from its founding in 2011 until 2015. From 2009 to 2010 he served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the US Department of Energy, and in 2024 he was appointed vice provost for research at Georgetown. Dr. Urbach's research interests include complex dynamical systems, biophysics, and soft matter physics. His diverse interdisciplinary collaborations have produced impactful publications in materials physics, cellular biophysics, biomaterials, optical imaging, and statistical physics. He received a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and other governmental agencies and private foundations. In 2000 he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and in 2016 he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Nitin Vaidya

Nitin Vaidya is the Robert L. McDevitt, KSG, KCHS, and Catherine H. McDevitt, LCHS, Chair in the Department of Computer Science. His research and teaching interests include distributed computing, privacy-preserving distributed algorithms, fault-tolerant algorithms, and wireless networking. He has served as the chair of the steering committee for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, editor in chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as editor in chief for the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems Users, Data, and Computing (SIGMOBILE) publication MC2R. Hen has coauthored papers that received awards at several conferences, including the ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom); the ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc); the International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS); and the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN).