School Notes: Jackson School of Global Affairs
May/June 2024

Notable visitors

Visitors to the Jackson School this spring included Michael Morell, former deputy director and acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who recorded a live episode of the podcast, Intelligence Matters: the Relaunch, that he cohosts with Jackson senior fellow Andy Makridis, the former chief operating officer of the CIA. 

Kai Bird, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer, visited campus in March. The school also hosted a panel discussion on reducing targeted violence and a conversation with Andrés Valenciano, director for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.  

Former UK official named professor in the practice

Rory Stewart, the former UK Secretary of State for International Development, has been named a professor in the practice of grand strategy at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Stewart will teach and serve as codirector of the school’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. 

Stewart previously served as a member of the National Security Council; minister of state for Africa, Middle East, and Asia; minister of state for prisons and probations; minister for the environment; and chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. He is the copresenter of the UK’s leading podcast, The Rest is Politics, and the author of five books. 

Jackson student research highlighted at WEF meeting in Davos

In January, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a panel of senior corporate executives and advocates made the business case for more equitable and authentic disability representation, citing results from a 2023 white paper produced in collaboration with a group of undergraduate global affairs majors from the Yale Jackson School. 

The team of ten students conducted the research as part of a Jackson School class in which students complete a public policy project on behalf of a real client.