Speaker

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri is director of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House and professor of international relations at SOAS University of London. She is chair of the faculty of the Queen Elizabeth II Academy at Chatham House (from 2018-2024, she was Dean of the Academy).

Leslie leads research initiatives on America’s Changing Global Role, Reimagining Multilateralism, and the US, Geopolitics, and the Global South. She is the author most recently of ‘Why Multilateralism Still Matters’ (Foreign Affairs).

She led the research initiative and was a contributing author to Building Global Prosperity: Proposals for Sustainable Growth (Chatham House, 2022).  She is co-editor and contributing author (with Charles A. Kupchan) of Anchoring the World: International Order in the 21^st Century, a publication by members of the Lloyd George Study Group on World Order, a joint Centenary project of Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, published by Foreign Affairs. And also Human Rights Futures (with Jack Snyder and Stephen Hopgood, Cambridge University Press, 2017), US Foreign Policy Priorities (Chatham House, 2020), and ‘Trials and Errors: Strategies of International Justice’ (with Jack Snyder).  

Her publications have also appeared in numerous edited volumes and journals including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, Ethics and International Affairs, and Survival.

She is a regular commentator in the international news media and has contributed pieces in the Financial Times, Guardian, Sunday Times, Telegraph, and The Independent. 

Leslie is vice chair of the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, and deputy chair of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission.

She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the Advisory Board of LSE IDEAS and the LSE Phelan United States Centre, and is vice president of the board for the Institute for Integrated Transitions.

From 2014-16 she was director of the Center on Conflict, Rights and Justice (and previously co-director). She was previously on the academic faculty of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a fellow of the John M. Olin Institute at Harvard University.

She began her career at Congressional Research Service and also worked in the Asia Bureau at USAID. Leslie received a BA from Wesleyan University (Phi Beta Kappa), an MSc (Distinction) from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Columbia University.