Lisa Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.
Dr. Anderson served as president of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016; prior to her appointment as president, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is dean emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; she has also taught at Princeton and Harvard Universities.
Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; and on social science, academic research, and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books is Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003); she has also published numerous scholarly articles, including “The Ex-Presidents” (2010), which was inspired by the dilemmas faced by the late president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, when he confronted leaving office at the end of his constitutionally-mandated second term.
Dr. Anderson is a trustee of the Aga Khan University, Tufts University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, she has received honorary degrees from Monmouth University and the American University in Paris.