Director's Message

We live in challenging times, ones that make the mission of the Watson Institute all the more urgent. I invite you to join our community, participate in our research and learning, and together with us help contribute to a more just and peaceful world.

Edward Steinfeld Howard R. Swearer Director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
 
Ed Steinfeld

The Institute’s core faculty of anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, sociologists and other specialists work in an interdisciplinary fashion with colleagues from across Brown’s campus and from across the world. The Institute collaborates with a wide variety of organizations, including the multilateral agencies, national and local governments, and non-governmental organizations worldwide to seek solutions to today’s most urgent policy challenges.

The Institute today is a hub of vibrant intellectual activity.  Our work combines a focus on three main thematic areas — development, security, and governance — with rich empirical knowledge generated by our regional programs on Brazil, China, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and the United States.  All of our work — our research, our teaching, and our public engagement — is comparative and interdisciplinary in nature.

Watson in recent years has experienced extraordinary growth. We have expanded the faculty by attracting exceptional scholars from across a number of fields. The Institute today is home to a thriving undergraduate concentration, International and Public Affairs, as well as a highly rigorous and intensive 12-month Master of Public Affairs program.  At the PhD level, the Watson Institute’s Graduate Program in Development provides training and research funding to Brown University doctoral students focused on issues of development in the Global South and beyond.  And, the Watson Institute Postdoctoral Fellows program attracts extraordinary early career scholars from across the social science disciplines and from around the world. Our growth over the past decade has been robust, but it is by no means a finished story. There is a great deal still to come.

With respect to our public mission, the Watson Institute every semester hosts a full agenda of seminar series, conferences, lectures, and workshops that feature leading scholars and public figures, and that open up exploration to the most pressing societal issues of our time.  

We live in challenging times, ones that make the mission of the Watson Institute all the more urgent. I invite you to join our community, participate in our research and learning, and together with us help contribute to a more just and peaceful world.

Edward Steinfeld
Howard R. Swearer Director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs