Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, joins Arizona State University

Arizona State University is pleased to announce that Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, has joined ASU as a distinguished professor of practice. 

Slaughter, former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, the first woman to hold that position, will be teaching a course based in Washington, D.C., on international organizations for the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU.

Sanjeev Khagram, director general and dean of Thunderbird, said, “With a global mindset and a renowned track record of improving the state of the world through collaborative leadership spanning sectors and borders, Professor Slaughter will engage, challenge and inspire our students to grow as global leaders for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Her combination of top-tier scholarship and experience in managing challenges caused by rapid technological and social change will provide a transformative learning experience for our students in the nation’s capital at a time when the world is in need of leaders who are equipped to solve complex problems across boundaries.”

“We are thrilled to have Anne-Marie, one of the world’s greatest legal scholars, provide our students with her depth of knowledge as a practitioner of politics,” said ASU Law Dean Douglas Sylvester. “As the head of the New America foundation and former top State Department official, combined with her distinguished career as a dean, professor and author, Anne-Marie will bring our students a wealth of political and international relations expertise unlike any other.”

Slaughter’s ASU course, taught together with Gordon LaForge, senior researcher at Princeton University and a Thunderbird lecturer, will examine the role and design of networks in global affairs with this premise: “We live in a world of nation-states, but also in an age of networks, creating a web of connectivity evident in the internet, the COVID-19 pandemic, air travel, global supply chains, international NGOs, terrorist and other criminal networks, and interdependent financial markets. New tools and strategies are needed to understand and influence a world based on connectivity: webcraft as well as statecraft. The course examines case studies of different global problems — from health to human rights, war to economic renewal, the environment to terrorism — drawing on the experience of course participants as much as possible.”

“I could not be happier to be joining the ASU community,” Slaughter said. “The opportunities for innovation and experimentation with new ways of teaching and bringing different streams of knowledge together are vast and exciting.”

As CEO of New America, a think ​and action ​tank dedicated to renewing the promise of America, Slaughter is leading efforts to bring the nation closer to its highest ideals. She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. After serving as the U.S. State Department’s first female director of policy planning from 2009–2011, she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, as well as meritorious service awards from USAID and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Prior to her government service, Slaughter was the dean of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994–2002.

Slaughter will teach the course from ASU’s Ambassador Barbara Barrett & Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Washington Center in Washington, D.C., where ASU brings its commitment and energy as a New American University to the nation’s capital, engaging with others who are prepared to transform ideas into action. The center houses ASU’s Washington, D.C.-based academic programs, including the Washington Bureau of Cronkite News (part of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication), the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and its International Rule of Law and Security program, the Capital Scholars program, Thunderbird’s Executive Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Management, and the McCain Institute’s Next Generation Leaders program, among many others. In addition to hosting classes and internships on-site, special lectures and seminars taught from the Barrett & O’Connor Washington Center are connected to classrooms in Arizona through video-conferencing technology.