About Us

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Michelle Murray

Faculty Director, Bard MA in Global Studies
Associate Professor of Politics, Bard College

BA, MA, PhD, University of Chicago. Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for International Studies, University of Chicago (2007–10); Deans Fellow in International Security and US Foreign Policy, John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Dartmouth College (2014–15). Recipient, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2006–07), Smith Richardson Foundation Summer Research Grant (2004/2006). Teaching and research interests include international relations theory; security studies; the politics of recognition among states; international history, especially pre–World War I Europe; and global governance and international organization. Her current research focuses on how the desire for status recognition shapes the military strategies of rising great powers, with a particular focus on American, British, and German naval strategy before World War I. This work has appeared in the journals Security Studies and Global Discourse, and as chapters in edited volumes. She presents regularly at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and International Studies Association. At Bard since 2010.

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Josie Snider

Assistant Director, MA in Global Studies

Josie Snider is the Assistant Director of the MA in Global Studies program. She holds an Erasmus Mundus MA in Global Studies from the University of Vienna and Leipzig University and a BA in Marketing Communications from Emerson College. With a background in international education, program development, and nonprofit marketing, she has worked with students and organizations across Europe and the U.S. Her experience spans teaching, mentorship, and strategic communications in sectors focused on global education, arts, and social impact.

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Duncan MacDonald ’23

Program Manager, Enrollment and Marketing, MA in Global Studies

Duncan joined the MAGS team in July 2023 after graduating from Bard College in May with a joint BA in Political Studies and French Studies. His Senior Project explored France's model of a feminist foreign policy from an ontological security perspective, leading to an investigation and critique of France's depiction of a feminist national self. During his time at Bard, he participated in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) certificate program where he interned with partner organization Foreign Policy Association, as well as an exchange semester at the Institute for Field Education (IFE) in Paris where he interned at Association Pierre Claver, a nonprofit organization offering comprehensive French language, culture, and society courses to refugees living in Paris to provide them with the range of skills and tools needed for life as a newcomer to France. 

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Erzsebet Strausz

Associate Professor of International Relations, CEU

Erzsebet Strausz is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Central European University in Vienna, where she teaches MA courses on international relations theory, international security and critical approaches. She holds a PhD from Aberystwyth University and her dissertation received the British International Studies Association’s Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize in 2013. Her research focuses on critical security studies, critical pedagogy, the politics of everyday life as well as creative, experimental and narrative methods in the study of world politics. Before joining CEU she taught at the University of Warwick where she was co-investigator of the Wellcome Trust-funded project 'Counterterrorism in the NHS: Evaluating Prevent Duty Safeguarding by Midlands Healthcare Providers.’ She was awarded the British International Studies Association’s Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize in 2017. More recently, she published a research monograph Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations: Towards a Politics of Liminality (Routledge, 2018) and together with shine choi and Anna Selmeczi, she is co-editor of Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (Routledge, 2019). Erzsébet was also the recipient of the CEU Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020.

PhD in International Politics, Aberystwyth University; MA in International Relations and European Studies, CEU.

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Nassim AbiGhanem

Faculty, Bard College Berlin

Nassim AbiGhanem received his MA in International Relations from the University of Manchester (2012), focusing on Middle Eastern conflicts. He recently completed his Ph.D. in International Relations at the Central European University (2021) titled "The Civil Society Organizations' Design and Implementation of Demobilization and Reintegration Programs". Using social network analysis (SNA) and life-course approaches, the dissertation explores the various brokerage and turning points that local civil society organizations conducted to demobilize and reintegrate ex-combatants in the city of Tripoli in Lebanon. His research interests include civil society organization (CSOs) resilience roles, civic engagement, non-state actors' involvement in international politics, and conflict management and peacebuilding. He is currently working on turning his PhD thesis into a book. Outside academia, AbiGhanem advised regional and international organizations on programmatic initiatives taking place in Lebanon.  

Dr. AbiGhanem was a Global Teaching Fellow at Bard College Berlin for the 2021/2022 academic year.

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Elisa Slattery

Visiting Faculty, Gender in International Affairs

Elisa Slattery was formerly senior program officer with the Open Society Foundations’ Women’s Rights Program, where she focused on sexual and reproductive rights. Prior to joining Open Society, Elisa was a consulting researcher at Amnesty International, where she documented human rights violations stemming from Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion law. She previously worked with the health law program of the International Development Law Organization in Rome. Elisa also served as the regional director for the Africa program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where her work focused on promoting reproductive rights through national, regional, and international accountability mechanisms and addressing the intersection of HIV and reproductive rights.

Elisa has worked as a consultant on workers’ rights issues in Kenya, conducted comparative legal and human rights research on the rights of incarcerated parents at the Brennan Center for Justice, and researched the impact of welfare reform on families with disabilities at the University of North Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. She holds a JD from Columbia Law School and a MA in history from Duke University.

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Giles Alston

Visiting Professor, Intelligence, Risk, & Decision Making

Giles joined the Analysis team at Oxford Analytica in 2021, having previously been with the Advisory team. He first worked for Oxford Analytica in 1985 while studying international relations at St Antony’s College and later joined the Department of Government at the University of Essex.

Giles is currently head of Oxford Analytica’s Global Risk Monitor, which tracks trends in global risk for a range of government and corporate clients. While with the Advisory team, he assisted with a range of projects including two of the company’s joint ventures, one with the New York Times and the other with a cyber defence firm, and the production of a long-running political risk index.

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James Ketterer

Visiting Faculty, Diplomacy and Development

James Ketterer is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College. He recently completed a 4-year term as Dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo, where he worked closely with the US Embassy in Egypt on projects that combined education, the arts and public diplomacy. He also served in Egypt as Country Director for AMIDEAST, an American educational NGO that works to enhance educational and cultural ties between the US and the Middle East and North Africa. Previously at Bard he was Dean of International Studies and Director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, taught courses on diplomacy and the Middle East and directed a summer institute on foreign policy supported by the US Department of State. He was Deputy Provost and Vice Chancellor at the State University of New York, where he was also Director of the Center for International Development, which implemented USAID-supported democracy projects in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ketterer works on election missions with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, including in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. He previously worked at the New York Senate and in the Near East-South Asia directorate of the National Security Council at the White House. He was a Boren Fellow in Morocco and a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow at the Bourguiba Institute of Languages in Tunisia. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Belgrade and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and is on the board of trustees of the Swedish Program, a liberal arts study abroad program based at the Stockholm School of Economics. 

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Christopher McIntosh

Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Bard College

Christopher McIntosh began teaching at Bard in 2010.  He received his PhD in 2013 from The University of Chicago, specializing in international relations and has an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown. His principal research and teaching interests revolve around international relations, security studies, temporality, and post-structural theory.  His primary research focuses on how the concept of war in contemporary international politics is constituted by sovereignty and the implications it has for the practice of political violence. This research builds on his dissertation, “What Makes a War, a War? Sovereignty, War, and the Subject of International Politics”.  At Bard he teaches courses on global ethics, sovereignty and war, terrorism, security, and international relations. Prior to Bard, Professor McIntosh has worked at CSIS and the Office of Naval Intelligence.

A.B., Political Science, University of Georgia; M.A., Security Studies, Georgetown University; M.A, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2010.

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Christopher LaRoche

Assistant Professor of International Relations, Central European University

Christopher David LaRoche is an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations, Central European University, visiting faculty in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program in New York City, and a non-resident fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies. His research focusses on international institutions, nuclear security, and political psychology. Before joining CEU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the China Institute, University of Alberta, and a fellow at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

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Elisabeta Dinu

Teaching Fellow, Public Policy

Elisabeta is a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, Austria, having submitted her dissertation and currently awaiting defense. She was a Visiting Researcher at the University of St Andrews in the UK and a Research Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. Her research also led her to conduct fieldwork in Lebanon. At CEU, she served as a Research Assistant for a project on the history of terrorism, working with press archives in several languages, and worked as a Teaching Assistant for courses in Policy Analysis, Public Management, and Terrorism and Counterterrorism. She also worked as a policy advisor in the private sector, focusing on digital policy, and in the Leadership Programs Department of the Aspen Institute Romania. She holds an MA in Public Policy from CEU and an MA in Comparative Politics from the University of Bucharest. Her regional expertise lies in the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, and more broadly, the politics of the European Union. She is interested in global policy dynamics, security and non-state actors, strategy and organizations, as well as policy learning and innovation. She is working on turning her doctoral dissertation, focused on explaining why some armed non-state actors grow into hybrids, into a book.

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Colleen Thouez

Visiting Faculty, Migration and Mobility

Colleen Thouez is the Director and Founder of the Refugee Resettlement Initiative at the National Association of Higher Education Systems, which supports university campuses to serve as communities of welcome for forcibly displaced students and their families who have recently arrived in the United States.  Dr. Thouez is a faculty at Bard College, a senior fellow at the New School’s Zolberg Institute, and a senior visiting fellow at SciencesPo Paris.  She has held previous academic positions at Columbia University’s Global Policy Initiative (2016-2018), and at American University School of International Service (2010-2012).  In 2022, she co-founded Europe Prykhystok, connecting Ukrainian and European communities in order to provide short-term get-aways for 700 Ukrainian children so far, many of whom are recently orphaned.  From 2017-2021, Dr. Thouez served as the inaugural director of the Welcoming and Inclusive Cities Division at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she conceived the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) and its Global Cities Fund for Pandemic Relief (2019), the Africa-Europe Mayors Dialogue (2020), and the University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants (2018).  Before joining OSF, for 17 years, she held leadership positions at the United Nations in the dual fields of adult education and international migration.  From 2004-2010, she was the Head of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the UN’s main training arm in New York, where she was responsible for the training of thousands of government delegates annually on all aspects of international law and the UN.  Dr. Thouez is also widely recognised for having driven advances in migration governance. She served as special advisor to the late Sir Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on migration until 2018; and, she continues to advise national governments, municipal governments, regional bodies, and UNHCR, IOM, the World Bank, OSCE, amongst others. Colleen is the Chair of the Advisory Board for the new Global Centre for Climate Mobility (GCCM), and a member of the Advisory Council of the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her most recent academic publications are “New power configurations: city mobilization and policy change” (2022) in Global Networks; and “Cities as emergent international actors in the field of migration” (2020), Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations.