This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, will be the principal speaker at Lafayette’s 178th Commencement Saturday, May 25, and will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.
Read details on the Commencement website
Anne-Marie Slaughter
“I am delighted that Anne-Marie Slaughter will address our graduates and parents at Commencement,” said Lafayette President Daniel H. Weiss. “She is one of the nation’s most incisive and influential commentators on international relations and global issues.”
Slaughter has been named to Foreign Policy magazine’s annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. She is Princeton’s Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs.
From 2009 to 2011 she served as director of policy planning for the State Department, the first woman to hold that position. She worked closely with the top leadership of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as executive director of the first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Released in December 2010, it provides a blueprint for elevating development as a pillar of American foreign policy and leading through civilian power.
Upon leaving the State Department she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She also received a Meritorious Honor Award from USAID and a Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award from the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe.
Slaughter was the first woman dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a position she held from 2002 to 2009. She rebuilt the school’s international relations faculty and created a number of new centers and programs. She was the convener and academic co-chair, with John Ikenberry, 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.
A contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine, she is a frequent contributor to both mainstream and new media, writing a monthly column for Project Syndicate, providing commentary on blogs, radio, and television, and curating foreign policy news for more 60,000 followers on Twitter.
Slaughter is author or editor of six books, including The Idea That is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007) and A New World Order (2004). The latter was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize, awarded to the world’s best non-fiction book in English or English translation that seeks to deepen public debate on significant global issues. It also was named one of the International Books of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement and was awarded honorable mention for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Government and Political Science by the Association of American Publishers. She has written more than 100 articles in international law and international relations and helped pioneer an integrated approach to both fields.
In a cover story in the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Slaughter described her experience of stepping down from her State Department position to teach at Princeton and spend more time with her children. The article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” spurred widespread discussion of work-life balance issues. In October 2012, she delivered the inaugural lecture in Lafayette’s Class of 1961 International Speaker Series, an address entitled “The Big Picture: Beyond Hot Spots and Crises in Our Interconnected World.”
In 2012 she received the Louis B. Sohn Award for Public International Law from the American Bar Association, the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute, and the Leadership Award from WIE Network.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Slaughter holds a B.A. from Princeton, an M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations from Oxford, and a law degree from Harvard. From 1994 to 2002, she was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. She was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from 2001 to 2002. Before joining the Harvard faculty she taught at the University of Chicago Law School.
She has served on many boards, including the Council on Foreign Relations and McDonald’s Corporation, and is currently on the board of the New America Foundation and Abt Associates. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and a consultant to Google, Inc.
Slaughter is married to Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and director of the university’s European Union Program. They reside in Princeton with their two sons.