2025 Speakers

Sung-Yoon Lee is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Lee has written on the politics of the Korean peninsula for numerous publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, CNN, The Hill, and many others.

He has testified several times as an expert witness at the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearings on North Korea policy and has advised senior leaders, including the President of the United States and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. 

Lee is the author of The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, North Korea’s Most Powerful Woman. The book was published by Pan MacMillan in the United Kingdom in June 2023 and by PublicAffairs in the United States and Canada in that September under the title, The Sister: North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World, with translation rights to date sold to eleven other countries, including Ukraine.

The Sister has received praise from numerous publications, including The Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Foreign Policy, Australian, Cipher Brief, Kirkus, Shelf Awareness, International Affairs, and Booklist (starred review), and has been selected as one of “Best Books of 2023” by several outlets.

Pan MacMillan named The Sister among “50 best autobiographies and biographies of all time”: https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/general/best-autobiographies-biographies-memoirs#political-historical-autobiographies-

Professor Kevin Powers is the Director of the “new” Master of Legal Studies in Cybersecurity, Risk & Governance Program at Boston College Law School, where he is a Lecturer-in-Law.

Previously, Kevin was the Founder and Director for the MS in Cybersecurity Policy and Governance Program at Boston College, and an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Boston College’s Carroll School of Management’s Business Law and Society Department.

With more than 25 years of combined cybersecurity, data privacy, business strategy, law enforcement, military, national security, higher education, and teaching experience, he has worked as an analyst and an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense, law firms in Boston and Washington, D.C., and as the General Counsel for an international software company based in Seattle, Washington.

Along with his teaching at Boston College, Kevin is a Cybersecurity Research Affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Lecturer for MIT Sloan's Executive Education Program - "Cybersecurity Governance for the Board of Directors."

He has also taught courses at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was the Deputy General Counsel to the Superintendent.

Kevin is an expert witness and consultant with the Analysis Group and serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees for Boston College High School, a Director for the Board of Reading Cooperative Bank, and a Cybersecurity Advisor for HYCU, Inc. (Backed by Bain Capital Ventures) and CyberSaint Security.

Previously, Kevin served as a member of the Boston College Law School Business Advisory Council (2018-2023) and served as the Panel Lead (2016-2017) for the Collegiate Working Group for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE). Kevin, a Navy Veteran, regularly provides expert commentary regarding cybersecurity and national security concerns for local, national, and international media outlets.

Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law at Yale Law School.

Daniel Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including law, philosophy, and economics. His writings have appeared in Science, The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Atlantic.

In 2021, Prospect Magazine named him to its list of the world’s top 50 thinkers.

His last book, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press, 2019), develops a sustained attack on American meritocracy. He is also working on a new book, tentatively called The Good Life after the Age of Growth.

Yasheng Huang is the Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Yasheng Huang is working on several policy projects related to US-China relations. He was one of the coauthors of MIT’s report, “University Engagement with China: An MIT Approach” and he is a co-chair of an implementation committee of that report.

He is a member of a taskforce at Asia Society on US-China policy and a member of Brookings-CSIS Advisory Council on Advancing US-China collaboration.

During 2023-4, he was a visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Professor Huang founded and runs China Lab, ASEAN Lab and India Lab, which have provided low-cost consulting services to hundreds of small and medium enterprises in these countries.

From 2015 to 2018, he ran a program in Yunnan province to train women entrepreneurs (funded by Goldman Sachs Foundation).

He has held or received prestigious fellowships such as the National Fellowship at Stanford University and the Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Fellowship.

The National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States.

He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and OECD, and serves on advisory and corporate boards of non-profit and for-profit organizations.

He is a founding member and is serving as the president of Asian American Scholar Forum, an NGO dedicated to open science, protection of rights and well-being of Asian American scholars.

Professor Huang is the author of 11 books in both English and Chinese and of many academic papers (such as on regulatory transparency, historical autocracy, statistical falsifications, tax, financing, sectoral and regulatory biases, history of reforms and strategy, and political economy of controls).

His most recent book, The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Might Lead to its Decline, was published by Yale University Press in 2023 and is forthcoming in complex Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Bulgarian editions. It was selected as The Best of Books 2023 by Foreign Affairs magazine: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/lists/best-books-2023 and by The Next Big Idea Club as one of the top 25 books on leadership in 2023: https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/top-23-leadership-books-2023/46876/

Monica Duffy Toft is Academic Dean, Professor of International Politics, and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.

Before joining Fletcher, Professor Monica Duffy Toft taught at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

While at Harvard, she directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs and was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

She was educated at the University of Chicago (MA and Ph.D. in political science) and at the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA in political science and Slavic languages and literature, summa cum laude).

Prior to this, Duffy spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist. Monica's areas of research include international security, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars and demography.

Her recent books include: Securing the Peace, (Princeton); Political Demography, (Oxford); and God's Century, (Norton). In addition she has published numerous scholarly articles and editorials on civil wars, territory and nationalism, demography, and religion in global politics. Monica can also be found on Twitter @monicaduffytoft.

Affiliations: Monica is a research associate of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

She is a supernumerary fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, a Global Scholar of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Political Instability Task Force.

In 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence, in 2012 she was named a Fulbright scholar, and most recently served as the World Politics Fellow at Princeton University.

Charles Sennott is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit news organization which serves as the home of Report for America and Report for the World. He is an award-winning correspondent, best-selling author and editor with 40 years of experience in international, national and local journalism. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe. And a leading social entrepreneur in new media, Sennott in 2009 became the co-founder of GlobalPost, an acclaimed international news website. He then went on to launch GroundTruth and served as its CEO and Editor-in-Chief from 2012 to 2022. In 2017, GroundTruth launched its local reporting initiative, Report for America, and in 2021 launched an international, sister program, Report for the World.

Throughout his career in journalism, Sennott has done distinguished, award-winning service as a journalist in the field. He has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 20 countries, including the post 9-11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2011 Arab Spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Ukraine. Sennott began his career in local news covering cops, courts and municipal government and his deep experience in global and local reporting led him to dedicate himself to supporting and training the next generation of journalists to serve communities through on-the-ground reporting in under-covered corners of the world. The 2018 recipient of the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, this year Sennott received the World Press Freedom Award from the James W.

Foley Legacy Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on May 1, marking World Press Freedom Day 2024.

Karen Jacobsen is the Henry J. Leir Professor in Global Migration at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.

Karen Jacobsen’s research focuses on migration and displacement in developing countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. She focuses on the experience, rights, vulnerability and resilience of forced migrants both in camps and in urban settings, and the policy and program responses developed by governments and international agencies towards refugees and internally displaced people. Two major areas of her work are the household economic and financial security of displaced people, and urban migration.

Jacobsen's current research explores urban displacement and global migration, with a focus on the livelihoods and financial resilience of migrants and refugees, and on climate- and environment-related mobility. She directs the Refugees in Towns Project at the Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security.

In 2013-2014, she was on leave from Tufts, leading the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS) at United Nations in Geneva. From 2000-2005, she directed the Alchemy Project, which explored the use of microfinance to support people in refugee camps.

Jacobsen's Ph.D. in Political Science is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her areas of expertise include refugee and migration issues, humanitarian assistance in developing countries, urban impact, and climate change and migration. She is currently at work on a book that examines the impact of displacement on cities. Her previous books include: Handbook of Forced Migration (Edward Elgar, 2023); A View from Below: Conducting Research in Conflict Zones (with Mazurana and Gale, Cambridge UP 2013 ); and The Economic Life of Refugees (Lynne Rienner, 2005). She consults and works closely with UNHCR and other UN agencies and international NGOs.

She is a citizen of both South Africa and the U.S., and splits her time between Brookline, MA and western Maine.

Stephen Walt is the Robert & Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, at The Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Stephen Walt previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

His book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, co-authored with John J. Mearsheimer) was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages.   His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).