On June 1, Samantha Power ’99 will return to Harvard Kennedy School as the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy and to Harvard Law School as the William D. Zabel ’61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights. Power, who recently served in the Biden administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, was most recently on the HKS and HLS faculty from 2017 to 2021.
“I had the great honor and privilege of working with, and learning from, Samantha Power when she was the ambassador to the United Nations,” said Jeremy Weinstein, Dean of Harvard Kennedy School. “We are very fortunate to have her return to the Kennedy School once again to train and mentor our students. With her record of public service and distinguished career in diplomacy, international development, and journalism, she is an outstanding model for the future public leaders and policymakers who come to HKS.”
“As a scholar and practitioner who has advocated vigorously on a world stage for human rights and the rule of law, Samantha will again bring her extraordinary experience-based expertise and distinct perspective to our community,” said John Goldberg, interim dean of Harvard Law School. “It’s great to welcome her back to her alma mater.”
“I am thrilled to be returning to Harvard, where the students themselves teach so much in the classroom, and where the faculty set their sights on tackling the world’s toughest challenges,” said Power. “There has never been a more important time to devise ideas for bolstering democratic institutions and the rule of law, and I am immensely grateful to be rejoining a community doing just that.”
At HKS, Power will be a faculty affiliate in residence at the School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, with additional affiliations at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights.
“We are delighted to have Samantha Power join the Ash Center,” said Archon Fung, director of the Ash Center and the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government. “She is a national treasure. Her powerful voice illuminates the most important challenges to democracy, good governance, and human rights all over the world and shows us the path forward. With her deep experience in foreign policy and development, she will bring distinctive insights to the work of the Ash Center and the Kennedy School.”
Power has had a distinguished career in the U.S. federal government and, earlier, as a foreign correspondent. Under her leadership at USAID from May 2021 to January 2025, the agency responded to countless humanitarian crises, surged partnerships with the private sector, and helped countries address the COVID-19 pandemic, democratic backsliding, severe debt distress, and the extreme weather harms caused by climate change. During the Obama administration, she served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 until 2017. In this role, she negotiated unprecedented sanctions against North Korea, rallied a cross-regional coalition to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and helped mobilize action to end the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Before serving as ambassador to the United Nations, Power served from 2009 until 2013 as special assistant to the president and senior director of multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council.
In addition to her career in government and public service, Power has deep experience teaching at Harvard. In 1998, she became the founding executive director of what is now the Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. The following year, she received her J.D. from Harvard Law School. From 2017 to 2021, Power was the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School — where she was affiliated with the Carr-Ryan Center and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs — and a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. She has also served as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Along with her J.D. from Harvard, Power holds a B.A. in History from Yale University. An immigrant to the United States from Ireland, Power was a war correspondent earlier in her career, covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia and other conflicts for publications including U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. Power has won accolades for her writing, including receiving the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2002 book “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.” She is also the author of “Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World” (2008) and co-editor of “The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World” (2011). Power published her best-selling memoir, “The Education of an Idealist,” in 2019. Among other recognitions, she has been named to lists including Time’s “100 Most Influential People,” Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Forbes’ “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.”
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