Advisory Board

Steven Brill

a Lecturer in English, Creative Writing & Journalism at Yale attended Yale for both undergrad and Law School. He has authored three books, two of which were New York Times best-sellers: Class Warfare: Inside the Fight To Fix America’s Schools (2011), AFTER: How America Confronted the September 12 Era (2003), and The Teamsters (1979). His founded Press+, an e-commerce platform that allows newspaper, magazine and other online publishers to realize revenue from digital subscribers. He also founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. He has written for magazines including The New Yorker, New York, Time, Harpers, and The New York Times Magazine. With his wife, Cynthia, Brill founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to encourage aspiring writers to pursue careers in journalism.

Nayan Chanda

is the founder and former editor-in-chief and current consulting editor of YaleGlobal Online Magazine, published by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. For nearly thirty years before he joined Yale University, Chanda was with the Hong Kong-based magazine The Far Eastern Economic Review as its editor, editor-at-large and correspondent. In 1989-90 Chanda was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. From 1990-1992 Chanda was editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, published from New York. He is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization (Yale University Press, 2007), as well as Brother Enemy: The War After the War and is the coauthor of over a dozen books on Asian politics, security and foreign policy. He is the recipient of the 2005 Shorenstein Award, which honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way it has helped an American audience understand the complexities of Asia. It is presented jointly by the Shorenstein Forum at Stanford and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Harvey Goldblatt

a professor of Medieval Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, has a B.A. from McGill University in Russian and a Ph.D. from Yale in Slavic Languages and Literatures. His academic interests include the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition, the literary patrimony of Slavia Orthodoxa, medieval Balkan Slavic literature, poetics of medieval and premodern East Slavic literary civilization, Church Slavonic language speculation, Slavic language questions, the Igor´ Tale. He has many publications on these topics, including “Variance and Invariance in Cyrillo-Methodian Hagiographic Writings” and “The Ukrainian Language in the Context of the Study of Sacred and Vulgar Tongues in Orthodox Slavdom.”

Charles Hill

a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, is a diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale University. He is a career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in a variety of roles such as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Middle East at the State Department, Chief of Staff of the same, and executive aid to former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Professor Hill has been a fellow at the Harvard University East Asia Research Center, a Clark fellow at Cornell University, and is currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as special consultant on policy to the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. Professor Hill has collaborated with former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on several works. He is also the editor of the three-volume Papers of U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, published by Yale University Press. His book “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order” is published by Yale University Press. His “Trial of a Thousand Years: Islamism and World Order” is published by the Hoover Press, Stanford University.

Mark Oppenheimer

who has a B.A. in History and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, both from Yale, now teaches in his alma mater’s English department. He coordinates the Yale Journalism Initiative, and has a long background in journalism himself, having been a newspaper beat reporter for the Hartford Courant, a magazine writer for The New York Times Magazine, an essayist for The American Scholar, Southwest Review, and Yale Review, and an historian of religion. He is the author of Wisenheimer, a memoir about his years as a high school debater, wrote the Beliefs column, about religion, for The New York Times.

Nathaniel Rich

a graduate of Yale, is the author of three novels: King Zeno (MCD/FSG, 2018), Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013), and The Mayor’s Tongue (Riverhead, 2008). His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’sViceVQR, and the American Scholar, among other publications. Rich is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Atlantic. He lives in New Orleans.

Nahid Siamdoust

is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Yale Program in Iranian Studies at the Council on Middle East Studies in the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She is the inaugural Ehsan Yarshater Fellow in Iranian Studies. She is also Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Dr. Siamdoust received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she graduated in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at St. Antony’s College. Her book, “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran” was published in 2017 by Stanford University Press. The book was based on Dr. Siamdoust’s doctoral thesis, which won the prizes for best dissertation in the field of Middle Eastern studies from both the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies as well as the Middle East Studies Association of America in 2014.

Dr. Siamdoust holds a B.A. in Political Science and Art History, and a Master of International Affairs – from Barnard College and Columbia University, respectively. Before returning to academia and concurrently with her studies, she worked as a full-time Iran and Middle East based journalist for TIME Magazine, Der Spiegel, The Los Angeles Times and Al Jazeera English TV. She has taught at Oxford University and NYU Steinhardt’s Media, Culture and Communication Department.

Ian Shapiro

a Yale Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institute for Social and Policy Studies and of Management also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, Sciences Po in Paris, and Nuffield College, Oxford. His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory (Princeton University Press, 2012) Politics Against Domination (Harvard University Press, 2016), and, with Frances Rosenbluth, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (Yale University Press, 2018). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.

Fred Strebeigh

is a Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Yale English and Forestry and Environmental Studies departments. His nonfiction writing has covered a wide range of subjects including the history and origins of nature writing, the role of the bicycle as a cultural force in China, the creation of a dictionary of American dialects, pressures on the Antarctic treaty system, natural and social conditions in the Falkland Islands, saving whales from fishing nets off the coast of Newfoundland, the impact of environmental issues on the presidential election in 2004, and defending the world’s largest system of scientific nature reserves in Russia. An article for the Times Magazine became the starting point for his book Equal: Women Reshape American Law (Norton, 2009). His teaching in 2004 received Yale’s DeVane Award, presented each year by Phi Beta Kappa to one member of the university’s active faculty, and in 2009 at Yale commencement received the Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence.

Ernesto Zedillo

is the Frederick Iseman ’74 Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization; Professor in the Field of International Economics and Politics; Professor of International and Area Studies; and Professor Adjunct of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the School of Economics of the Natìonal Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University. He was a Professor at the Natìonal Polytechnic Institute and El Colegio de Mexico. From 1978–87 he was with the Central Bank of Mexico; from 1987–88 he served the National Government of Mexico as Undersecretary of Budget; from 1988–1992 as Secretary of Economic Programming and the Budget; and he was appointed Secretary of Education in 1992. In 1994 Zedillo ran for the presidency and won. He served his country as President of Mexico from 1994–2000.

He previously served on the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament and is currently is a member of the G30 and the Board of Directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is a Distinguished Practitioner of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford and in 2011 he was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society. He holds honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard Universities; the University of Ghana; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and the University of Miami.

His edited volume, Rethinking the War on Drugs through the US-Mexico Prism (YCSG), was published in 2012.