FPRI Announces 2019 Fellows

March 26, 2019

The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is pleased to announce the appointment of its 2019 fellows –eighteen of them, as described below. The fellows named below reflect a vast variety of experience and are expected to speak, write, and/or develop programming and publications for FPRI, contributing to FPRI’s role in enriching the public discourse on foreign policy and national security. We are pleased to describe below our 2019 Eurasia Fellows, Templeton Fellows, the Novakovic Fellow, Trainor Fellow, and other 2019 appointments. (Fox Fellows and the Distinguished Research Fellow are announced mid-year.)

Eurasia Program Fellows

FPRI’s Eurasia Program was founded in 2015 with the aim of examining the political, security, economic and social trends shaping Europe and Eurasia. Fellows are selected to support the ongoing program and help create and sustain new initiatives.

Stephen Kotkin is the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Two volumes of his trilogy on Stalin have been published to critical acclaim — Stalin: Paradoxes of Power (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler (2017). Paradoxes of Power was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Waiting for Hitler won the 2018 Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council of Foreign Relations. His earlier books include: Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (2009); Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse (2008), and Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1995). He writes frequently on Russian and Eurasian affairs for The New Yorker, New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Washington Post.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and holder of the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in economic geography and national security. He is also a non-resident fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the Loisach Group, a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and the Marshall Center that works to enhance U.S. and Germany’s security partnership. He is a contributing editor of The National Interest, coauthor of Decision-Making in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of US National Security (Oxford University Press, 2018), and co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors and Sectors (CQ Press, 2014).

Col. Robert E. Hamilton (U.S. Army, Ret.) is an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the U.S. Army War College. In a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as a Eurasian Foreign Area Officer, he served overseas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Qatar, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Pakistan and Kuwait. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Virginia.

Una Bergmane is a Teaching Fellow at the London School of Economics. She holds a Ph.D. from Sciences Po Paris. She was a 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on Soviet disintegration and the end of the Cold War, Russian-Baltic relations, and contemporary politics of Latvia.

Lukas Milevski is an assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategy. He has published two books with Oxford University Press, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016) and The West’s East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018). His articles have appeared in RUSI Journal, Parameters, Joint Forces Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Indra Ekmanis is Associate Editor for Global Nation at PRI’s The World. She has a PhD in international studies from the University of Washington. She was a research scholar at the Wilson Center in 2017-2018 and a Fulbright researcher in Latvia in 2016-2017. Her work concentrates on social integration and civil society in the post-Soviet space and immigration in the U.S.

Maximilian Hess is the Head of Political Risk Analysis and Consulting at AKE International in London, where he also heads the Europe and Eurasia desks. He is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College and SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the relationship between trade, debt, international relations and foreign policy, as well the overlap between political and economic networks.

Alex Nice is a senior columnist at FPRI’s BMB Russia, covering Finance, Aerospace, Agro, and Pharma in his Monday column. He has just returned from a year in Moscow, where he was based at the Higher School of Economics Development Centre. In 2013-17 he was Regional Manager at The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London covering Russia and the CIS. He was also Coordinator of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Melinda Haring was promoted from Fellow to Senior Fellow in recognition of her six years of work on our Project on Democratic Transition and subsequently in our Eurasia Program. She is Editor of UkraineAlert Blog at the Atlantic Council and writes widely for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post. She contributed a chapter to FPRI’s book Does Democracy Matter?

Templeton Fellows

Supported by a gift from the Templeton family, the Templeton Fellows are distributed across the existing research programs of FPRI, though for the first time, we are also appointing a Templeton Education Fellow to support FPRI’s educational programming.

Dominic Tierney is associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He received his Ph.D. in international politics from Oxford University, and has held fellowships at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, the Olin Institute at Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His latest books are How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Little, Brown and Co., 2010) and The Right Way to Lose a War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, International Security, and Orbis, among other outlets. He blogs regularly at The Atlantic.

Aaron Stein is the new Director of FPRI’s Middle East Program. Previously, Dr. Stein was a resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, where he managed their Turkey-related research program, oversaw work on nonproliferation in the Middle East with a focus on Iran, and researched non-state actors in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq. He was a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy (Switzerland), an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (London), and Nonproliferation Program Manager at the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (Istanbul). Dr. Stein has published in such peer-reviewed journals as Survival and RUSI Journal, and in such periodicals as Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, and The American Interest. He holds an MA in international policy studies with a specialization in nonproliferation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean studies from King’s College, London. He conducts a fortnightly podcast Middle East Brief.

Dana Devon (Templeton Education Fellow) enjoys a wealth of experience in educational programming: she was Vice President of Education Programs for the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, Director of Educational Programming for the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, and Director of Web Educational Programs for the National Constitution Center. She has taught law at St. Joseph’s University and was a practicing lawyer. She currently assists the Museum of the American Revolution.

Edward Turzanski served in the US intelligence community. He regularly appears on local, national, and international media – in some 4 dozen venues – to comment on national security, intelligence, terrorism and homeland security, and is frequently consulted by government officials, locally and nationally. He is a regular panelist on Philadelphia ABC affiliate WPVI TV 6’s “Inside Story” and is Vice President of the Union League of Philadelphia, where he chairs the annual citizenship day for hundreds of students in the Philadelphia area.

Ronald Granieri is Executive Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West, Editor of the Center’s E-publication The American Review of Books, Blogs, and Bull, and Host of Geopolitics with Granieri, a monthly series of events for FPRI Members. He is a specialist in Contemporary German and International History with degrees from both Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of a Federal Chancellor Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and is a member in the American Council on Germany’s Young Leader Program. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Syracuse University, Furman University, and the University of Tubingen. He is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), and is currently completing a book entitled: The Fall and Rise of German Christian Democracy, From Detente to Reunification, for Oxford University Press.

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he researches the history of surveillance and social control in North Korea, and editor of North Korean Economy Watch. He publishes regularly on Korean affairs in publications such as IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review and The Diplomat, and has previously worked as a journalist, and has been a special advisor to the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation. He is spending the 2018-19 academic year in South Korea and writing a regular “Letter from Seoul” for FPRI.

Novakovic Fellow

Supported by a gift from Michael and Phebe Novakovic, the Novakovic Fellowship is designed to contribute to the activities of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West and its related work in civic education.

Agnieszka Marczyk wears multiple hats as a Fellow in FPRI’s Eurasia Program, Senior Fellow at our Butcher History Institute, and now a Novakovic Fellow of our Center for the Study of America and the West. Her current research explores inquiry-based learning in high school history classrooms. She collaborates with teachers and historians to create curricular materials that invite students to engage in critical analysis of historical arguments and evidence. She offers professional development workshops for teachers, and works with schools and districts to help make rigorous inquiry-based instruction available to all students. Her writing focuses on democracy and cross-cultural understanding. She is co-editor, with Adam Michnik, of Against Anti-Semitism: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Polish Writings (Oxford, 2018) and Does Democracy Matter: The United States and Global Democracy Support (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in European intellectual history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor USMC Fellow

This fellowship, supported by the Iron Hill Charity Golf Open, is designed for a recent military veteran who aspires to a career in long-form journalism.

Ann Toews (Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor USMC Fellow) formerly served as a military intelligence officer with the 173^rd Airborne Brigade in Europe and Afghanistan and later contributed to reactivating the 207^th Military Intelligence Brigade in support of U.S. Army Africa. Ann holds an M.P.A. with a focus on Development Studies from Princeton University and a B.A. in History (with honors in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law) from Stanford University.

Other Appointments

Claire Finklestein (Senior Fellow) is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law, Professor of Philosophy. Her current research addresses national security law and policy, with a focus on ethical and rule of law issues. In 2012, Professor Finkelstein founded Penn Law’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), a nonpartisan interdisciplinary institute that seeks to promote the rule of law in modern day conflict, warfare, and national security. An expert in the law of armed conflict, military ethics, and national security law, she is a co-editor (with Jens David Ohlin) of The Oxford Series in Ethics, National Security, and the Rule of Law, and a volume editor of its four titles thus far: Targeted Killings: Law & Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford, 2012); Cyber War: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts (Oxford, 2015); Weighing Lives in War (Oxford, 2017); and Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority (Oxford University Press, 2019). Professor Finkelstein has briefed Pentagon officials, U.S. Senate staff, and JAG Corps members on various issues in national security law and practice. She is a frequent radio, broadcast, and print commentator and has published op-eds in The New York Times and The Hill.