short bio

Biography

Anne-Marie Slaughter '80, the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, has served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University since September 2002. Slaughter came to the Wilson School from Harvard Law School where she was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program.

Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard in both international law and international relations, Slaughter’s career bridges the worlds of academic international law and international relations and practical foreign policy. Her work helped pioneer the current emphasis on cross-fertilization between international relations and international law.

Slaughter writes and teaches broadly on global governance, international criminal law, and American foreign policy. Her most recent book is The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World, published by Basic Books. She is also the author of A New World Order, in which she identified transnational networks of government officials as an increasingly important component of global governance. She is the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States, and is a member of the National War Powers Commission. She is also one of the authors of Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st National Security Strategy, the 2008 report of the Center for a New American Security's Phoenix Initiative. She spent the 2007-2008 academic year on sabbatical in China with her family, as a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

In addition to her numerous scholarly writings, Slaughter is a frequent contributor to national and international news media. She also lectures regularly to academic audiences and civic groups. Slaughter is a former President of the American Society of International Law and currently serves on the boards of a number of organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, and the Canadian Institute for International Governance Innovation. She is also a member of the Citigroup Economic and Political Strategies Advisory Group and the Aspen Strategy Group. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other honors, Slaughter gave a set of Millennial Lectures at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2000 and won the Francis Deak Prize awarded by the American Journal of International Law in 1990 and 1994.

Slaughter was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia by her American father and Belgian mother. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1980 where she majored in the Woodrow Wilson School and received a certificate in European cultural studies. She won the Daniel M. Sachs Memorial Scholarship, one of Princeton's top honors, which provides for two years of study at Oxford University. She received her M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in international relations from Oxford in 1982 and 1992, respectively, and her law degree from Harvard Law School, cum laude, in 1985. She continued at Harvard after graduation as a researcher for her academic mentor, the distinguished international lawyer Abram Chayes. Before joining the Harvard faculty she taught at the University of Chicago Law School.