Ann-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America, a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic platform dedicated to renewing America in an age of rapid technological and social change.

She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 2002.

From 2009 to 2011, she served as the first female director of policy planning for the State Department, reporting directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was a position she referred to as her “dream job.”

When she accepted the position knowing she would need to be away from her husband and two young boys during the week, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family back in Princeton, New Jersey.

But then life intervened, and parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department after her initial two-year commitment and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.

The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her children led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent 2012 article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” quickly became the most read article in the magazine’s history and sparked intense national debate on the continued obstacles to full male-female equality.

She followed up the article with Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, The Economist and National Public Radio.

Upon leaving the State Department, Dr. Slaughter received its highest honor, the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which provided a blueprint for advancing America’s interests in areas such as global security, inclusive economic growth and climate change.

She also received meritorious service awards from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe for her State Department work.

Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002 to 2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994 to 2002.

She was the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multiyear research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States.

In addition to Unfinished Business, she has written or edited ​seven​ other books, including ​The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (2017), which was named by Foreign Affairs as one of the “Best Books of 2017”; The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007); ​and ​A New World Order (2004). She is also the author of more than 100 scholarly articles.

Dr. Slaughter is a contributing editor to the Financial Times and writes a bimonthly column for Project Syndicate. She provides frequent commentary for both mainstream and new media and curates foreign policy news for over 140,000 Twitter followers.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Philosophical Society, Dr. Slaughter was on Foreign Policy magazine’s annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for four consecutive years.

A native of Charlottesville, Virginia, she earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1980 and both a master’s (1982) and a doctor of philosophy degree (1992) in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Princeton Daniel M. Sachs Scholar.

She earned a juris doctorate, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1985.

Dr. Slaughter and her husband, Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of politics and international affairs and director of the European Union Program at Princeton, live in Princeton, New Jersey, with their two sons, Edward and Alexander.