Samantha Power
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Samantha Power is a professor of practice at Harvard Law School and the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She is a former US permanent representative to the United Nations and a former member of President Obama’s cabinet.
Prior to serving as US permanent representative to the United Nations, Power served as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council 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.
Power received a BA from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002) and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008), the basis for the award-winning HBO documentary Sergio (2009). She is also the coeditor of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (PublicAffairs, 2011). Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from such places 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.
