Dan Whitman

Non-Resident Senior Fellow - Eurasia Program

Dan Whitman is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a former United States Foreign Service Officer.

As Foreign Service Officer, Whitman was posted in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Haiti, Cameroon. He briefly served in Ghana, Guinea, and Nigeria, South Sudan, Mauritius, Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, and Congo-Brazzaville.

As Assistant Professor at American University 2009-2020, he taught Foreign Policy, research methods, cross cultural communication, and oral history. In 2022, Dan worked on the Biden White House Summit on Africa. Currently he teaches at George Washington University.

Whitman began his public diplomacy work in 1969, when he was the assigned French interpreter for an African visitor under the International Visitors Program of the U.S. Information Agency.  Since then he accompanied African and French visitors in the IV program for a thirteen year period, then planned programs for IVs at Delphi Research Associates.  He was a Fulbright scholar in 1980-81 in Brazzaville, after earning his PhD at Brown University in 1979. 

Whitman is the author of eight books, including A Haiti Chronicle, documenting the three Haitian elections of 2000.  His oral history of educational and cultural exchanges between apartheid South Africa and the United States was published in 2014 by the SUNY Press.