International Speaker Series 2020: Coming Soon!

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is a leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world. One of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People,” she is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School. Her recently published book, The Education of an Idealist, chronicles her years in public service and reflects on the role of human rights and humanitarian ideals in contemporary geopolitics.

Power spent half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events and eight years at the UN helping to shape them. As the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, and helped mobilize global action against ISIL (ISIS). From 2009 to 2013, she served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Called “a powerful crusader for U.S. foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy” by Forbes, Ambassador Power was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

Before joining the U.S. government, Ambassador Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a columnist for Time, and a National Magazine Award-winning contributor to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.