Me (Julie Napear Photography)
I'm an international affairs analyst, editor, and program manager from and living in the Washington, DC area. My areas of interest include European and U.S. politics, political economy, and foreign and security policies; the state of liberalism and democracy and how to deal with threats to both; history; and culture, particularly film.
Since fall 2019, I’ve been the publications editor for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, managing and editing the program’s papers and policy briefs as well as its Twitter account. I was previously a senior research assistant at Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) for two years. In this role I worked closely with CUSE scholars including Amanda Sloat, Alina Polyakova, Tom Wright, Célia Belin, and Constanze Stelzenmüller; helped design and launch the Trans-Atlantic Scorecard; co-authored a paper with Belin, “Mutations of the left in Western Europe,” as well as the multi-author report “The anatomy of illiberal states: Assessing and responding to democratic decline in Turkey and Central and Europe”; and coordinated the Hewett Forum on post-Soviet affairs. I was also a 2017-2018 Penn Kemble Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy.
Before moving to Brookings, I worked as program officer at the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a small think-tank-within-a-think-tank which brought together brilliant scholars from Europe, North America, and beyond to work on common topics, and which unfortunately closed in June 2017. I had a hand in editing the Transatlantic Academy reports The Democratic Disconnect: Citizenship and Accountability in the Transatlantic Community (2013), Liberal Order in A Post-Western World (2014), Faith, Freedom, and Foreign Policy: Challenges for the Transatlantic Community (2015); Russia: A Test for Transatlantic Unity (2016); and Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era (2017, which I also co-authored), as well as dozens of policy papers and blogs. I've presented to policymakers, university audiences, and other experts in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere, and been interviewed live on Al Jazeera and by several other outlets. As a resident fellow at GMF in the second half of 2017, I wrote a paper on the evolving foreign policy of the Democratic Party.
Earlier in my career, I drafted policy reports for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels, worked as a research assistant on books and papers on topics ranging from global governance and U.S. foreign policy to German-Russian relations to U.S. democracy promotion policy in the Middle East, and performed media analysis and energy policy research in the private sector. I received a master's in international affairs from Johns Hopkins-SAIS, spending a fantastic year in Italy at the Bologna Center (now "SAIS Europe").
I grew up in northern Virginia, studied at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, studied abroad in London in spring 2003, taught high school in Hamburg on a Fulbright grant in 2005-06, and worked as a journalist - as an editor and writer for my high school and college newspapers, as a freelancer or intern for papers in Virginia, Maine, Maryland, and DC, as a 2006 World Cup blogger for the International Herald Tribune and film reviewer for the Hamburg Express, as a reporter for the Saratogian of Saratoga Springs, New York for a year, and as a contributor to the Washington Post's Post Global Next Europe blog while at SAIS. When I'm not working, I enjoy traveling, reading, cinema, hiking, and birdwatching.