Worlds Apart, Worlds Together professor: Anders Hardig
Dr. Anders Härdig is a Professorial Lecturer in the International Politics program at SIS. His main fields of expertise are international politics and comparative and regional studies with a special focus on social movements and grassroots networks in the Middle East. Dr. Härdig’s dissertation examined grassroots struggles to broaden the space for political participation in the Middle East, using a case study of civic grassroots activists in Lebanon.
A former student and research affiliate at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, Dr. Härdig is a frequent traveler to the Middle East. He is the recipient of several scholarships and grants, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship, and multiple grants from the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. In recent years, Dr. Härdig has worked as a researcher and consultant for American and European companies on projects in Lebanon.
Diplomacy and Dictators professor: Tom Long
Tom Long is completing his doctorate in American University’s School of International Service. His dissertation, Convincing the Colossus: Latin American Leaders Face the United States, examines the strategies and approaches of Latin American leaders who seek to influence U.S. policies that affect their interests. As part of that project, he has conducted archival research and interviews with top-level policymakers in Argentina, Colombia, and Panama; he will be travelling to Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the coming months to conclude his fieldwork.
In addition to his work in Latin America, Long is a student of U.S. foreign policy history and the foreign policy process. Like his research, his teaching seeks to incorporate original documents and a variety of theoretical frameworks to help students try to understand foreign policy decisions from the perspectives of those who had to make them. What information did they have at the time? What metaphors did they seek to understand the problems they faced? What were their goals, and how did their decisions affect the course of U.S. history?
Long has published in Latin American Research Review (co-authored with Robert A. Pastor) and has given papers at a number of academic conferences including the International Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. In addition to his dissertation work, he is currently writing on the role of the U.S. Congress in the making of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. He taught “Diplomacy and Dictators” during summer 2011 and was previously honored with the SIS award for excellence in teaching by a doctoral student. Prior to coming to American University, he studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and worked for several years as a reporter and editor.
Global Public Health professor: Katherine Goodwin Reese
Katherine Reese is a doctoral student at American University in Washington DC. She studied at Rice University and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris before beginning the PhD program at the School of International Service. Her interests revolve around international communication, mobility, and environmental politics.
Reese’s dissertation, Repaving the Way: The Automobile and the Politics of the Future, investigates the relationship between social imagination and political action. It looks at how policymakers, urban planners, and civil society organizations thought and spoke about the future of transportation during key moments in US history, asking how discussions about the future served to legitimize or discredit radical political visions. Reese’s article "Reconstructing Automobility: The Making and Breaking of Modern Transportation," was recently published in Global Environmental Politics. The article interrogates the socially constructed role played by the automobile in modern life, analyzing the ways in which we have historically come to take for granted fossil fuels, cars, and even mobility itself. Reese has also presented papers on transportation and its effects on human and ecological health at several conferences.
Reese has taught courses on sustainability and technology for the National Student Leadership Conference program, served as a teaching assistant for courses on international communication and world politics in American University’s School of International Service, and supervises student research projects in her position as graduate fellow in American University’s University College program.
In addition to her own research and teaching, Reese served as project coordinator for the Global Public Media Project, working with an international team of researchers to investigate the role of social media on political life around the world. She recently helped to organize a workshop at the annual conference of the International Studies Association entitled "Global Environmental Politics on a New Earth," which brought together leading scholars in the field to discuss the most pressing issues in environmental studies. She currently serves as managing editor for the Journal of International Relations and Development.
