A nation must think before it acts.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is pleased to announce the appointment of its 2023 Templeton Fellows. Recipients of the Templeton Fellowship work across FPRI’s research programs on a variety of projects throughout the year.
The Templeton Fellowships are named for the late John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D., who had a decades-long association with FPRI, serving as Vice Chair of FPRI’s Board of Trustees and, along with his beloved wife Josephine “Pina” Templeton, generously supported FPRI for many years. We’re deeply grateful to them both and to the Templeton Family and the Psalm 103 Foundation for their support to FPRI and its mission.
Young’s current research project examines how Sudanese intellectuals and businessmen conceptualized the rise of the Arab Gulf beginning in the 1970s and built economic, political, and labor relationships between Sudan and the Gulf region. He is also engaged in two collaborative research projects: a study of post-partition conflicts in the Horn of Africa (e.g., Sudan-South Sudan and Ethiopia-Eritrea) with political scientist Michael Woldemariam, and a study of East African ideas of federation. Along with Nathalie Puetz of NYU Abu Dhabi, Young has been awarded a research grant by the Social Science Research Council to conceptualize the Red Sea as a region of study.
A frequent contributor to international media outlets such as Al Jazeera, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, Young is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton University for the 2019–2020 term.
Prior to joining FPRI and AidData, Nara completed her PhD in Economics at UMass Amherst. Her dissertation was on the political economy of peace and conflict, in particular peacebuilding and ethnic reconciliation in conflict/post-conflict countries. Nara is a Steering Committee member and Co-Founder of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ), and maintains affiliations with Security in Context and Human Security Lab.
As Foreign Service Officer, Whitman was posted in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Haiti, and 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.
In 2022, he co-authored with Hassan Sarbakhshian and Parvaneh Vahidmanesh Jews of Iran: A Photographic Chronicle (Penn State University Press, 2022), and together with Honaida Ghanim and Tamir Sorek, they established the journal Palestine/Israel Review, where he serves as the Associate Editor.
Sternfeld is currently working on two book projects: “The Origins of Third Worldism in the Middle East” and a new study of the Iranian-Jewish diaspora in the U.S. and Israel
She has spent much of her career focusing on religiously motivated violence, causes of extremism, irregular warfare, and leveraging culture in population centric conflicts, including repairing communities and national unity in the wake of war and political instability. She has held several positions in and out of government service, including at the U.S. Army War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the RAND Corporation.
Dr. Gregg earned her PhD in Political Science in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds a Master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied Islam, and a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr. Gregg has published extensively on religiously motivated conflict, extremism, and population centric warfare, including: Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “Religiously Motivated Violence” (Oxford University Press 2016); Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska 2018);The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska 2014); and co-editor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac, 2010).