Ambassador Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the International Peace and Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Ambassador Power is also Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School and a 2017-18 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2013-2017) and former member of President Obama’s National Security Council.
Prior to serving as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Power served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Staff at the White House. In this role she focused on issues including UN reform; LGBT and women’s rights; the promotion of religious freedom and the protection of religious minorities; human trafficking; and democracy and human rights.
Before joining the U.S. government, Ambassador Power was the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, teaching courses on U.S. foreign policy, human rights, and UN reform. She was also the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
Ambassador Power is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008), the basis for the award-winning HBO documentary, “Sergio.” She is also the co-editor of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011). Ambassador Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, and contributed regularly to The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. She is currently working on a new book, a memoir “The Education of an Idealist”, (HarperCollins) about her time in the Obama administration and her “transition from critic of U.S. foreign policy to U.S. government official,” as she put it in a statement.
Ambassador Power immigrated to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. She graduated from Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia and received a B.A. from Yale University (1992) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1999). She is married to Cass Sunstein, with whom she has two young children.
