Dear Colleagues,
As the year comes to a close, I want to celebrate upon their retirement three extraordinary, long-term SFS faculty members who have had a tremendous impact on our school and on generations of our students: Chet Crocker, Ted Moran and Tamara Sonn.
Chet Crocker
By one conservative estimate more than 1,000 MSFS students have been privileged to have had Chet Crocker as their professor over his 49 years of teaching at Georgetown. Today, graduates of “Crocker” classes occupy senior positions in government, non-profit organizations and for-profit enterprises. All have benefitted from their exposure to this brilliant scholar/practitioner.
Chet Crocker has been the quintessential scholar/practitioner at Georgetown. He melds experiences in senior positions in the government and non-profit world into pathbreaking publications and stimulating classes in the field of conflict resolution. Whether it is through clever titles, like High Noon in Southern Africa, Dogs of War, Herding Cats and Grasping the Nettle or his sly wit, Chet imparts wisdom from his experiences in managing U.S. negotiations in African, Indian Ocean and Middle East affairs in a thoughtful and compelling manner. Students have always flocked to his courses. As a senior colleague noted, “They do not want to just learn from Chet — they want to be him.” Though he received his PhD from a rival institution, Chet has remained committed to the Georgetown community. Operating from a book-lined perch on the top floor of the ICC, Chet has always been accessible to students and faculty colleagues seeking his guidance on career choices and on substantive questions of grand strategy, conflict and mediation.
Chet’s many public activities include serving as U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs, staff officer at the National Security Council, Director of African Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He was a principal diplomatic architect and mediator in the prolonged negotiations among Angola, Cuba and South Africa that led to Namibia’s transition to independence and the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola. Despite these many successes, he noted to a colleague that his proudest moment was attending the swearing in of his daughter Sheba to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization. They remain one of the only father-daughter teams of assistant secretaries in U.S. State Department history! Sheba later joined the SFS as a Centennial Fellow.
Chet is a strategic thinker, constantly anticipating what the future may hold and encouraging others to do the same. He has been an active participant in SFS working groups. He co-chaired, with Casimir Yost, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy’s Schlesinger Working Group on Strategic Surprise, which over roughly a decade explored why national leaders are surprised by state and non-state actors and natural events and what can be done to reduce the likelihood of such surprises. Chet continued his support of the Institute’s research on diplomacy as a core participant in its on-going series on New Global Challenges, lending his wisdom and rich perspective to each conversation. He will remain focused in his research and writings on translating theory into action as the Institute’s Schlesinger Distinguished Research Fellow and remain an engaged member of both the academic and the policy worlds. Both will be enriched by his continued presence.
Chet’s career at Georgetown spanned multiple decades of dynamic changes around the world and within the MSFS, ISD and SFS programs. He helped guide these programs by providing insights into evolving global challenges — from resolving civil wars to managing the COVID pandemic — and the shifting needs of all members in the Georgetown community. His enduring legacy will be the legion of men and women who can say with pride, “I had Chet Crocker as my professor.” In many ways, all of us — colleagues, friends, practitioners and scholars — are students of Chet Crocker.
Ted Moran
After more than four decades at Georgetown, Ted Moran is retiring on December 31, 2021. Ted holds the Marcus Wallenberg Chair in International Business and Finance. He was the founder of the Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy, and served as its director for decades. Generations of IBD Certificate holders credit Ted with the competitive edge that shaped their careers. He was also the long-serving Director of the International Wallenberg Fellows Program in cooperation with the Stockholm School of Economics and the Co-Director of the Global Business Fellows program established in cooperation with the McDonough School of Business. In 2014, he took the helm as the director of the SFS Global Business Major, which he had been instrumental in developing. In all of these areas, Ted built the foundation for the strong collaboration between the McDonough School of Business and SFS, which continues to distinguish our offerings in the crucial intersection of business and global affairs.
Ted’s research focuses on international economics, business, foreign affairs and public policy. His many publications address wide-ranging themes, including the impact of foreign direct investment on development, the changing nature of political risks for international investors and the impact of globalization on workers and communities in both developed and developing countries. His more recent books cover national security dilemmas, global supply chains, international trade, policy and investment and much more.
These issues have long informed his teaching in the IBD, International Affairs and Global Business programs. For the past 43 years, Ted has provided both undergraduates and graduate students courses on international business-government relations year in and year out, taking his first sabbatical only in his forty-fourth year at Georgetown. In 2013, Ted developed and subsequently taught Georgetown’s first Massive Open On-line Course (MOOC), Who are the Winners and Losers from Globalization? Developed in partnership with edX, the course, which enrolled about 20,000 students from 150 countries, focused on how to spread the benefits of globalization more evenly among developed and developing countries.
Ted has been a leader beyond Georgetown, serving in a number of governmental and non-governmental roles. Between 1993 and 1994, he was the Senior Adviser for Economics on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff where he was responsible for trade, finance, technology, energy and environmental issues. He served as Counselor to the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank Group (appointed in 2000), the Chairman of the Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards (2002) and Associate to the National Intelligence Council, serving on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (2007-2013). He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations and diverse governments in Asia and Latin America as well as to international business and financial communities. He has long been a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and also at the Center for Global Development.
Ted must be recognized as one of the pioneers who shaped the modern day SFS. We will forever remain deeply grateful for his service and his impact.
Tamara Sonn
We recognize and honor Professor Tamara Sonn, who is retiring on December 31, 2021. Tamara, the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the History of Islam and the current Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, came to Georgetown seven years ago following a distinguished academic career at Temple University, St. John Fisher College, the University of South Florida and, between 1999 and 2014, the College of William and Mary, where she was the Kenan Professor of Religion and Humanities.
An expert on Islamic intellectual history and contemporary issues in Islam, Tamara has been an extraordinarily productive scholar. She has authored or co-authored over a dozen books and more than 100 chapters and articles. Her scholarship bridges classical, medieval and modern Islam with a geographic range that extends from the Arab World to South Africa and South Asia. Her work has defined new fields of scholarship within Islamic Studies, including the study of Muslim minority experiences, religious pluralism in Islam, the implications of core Islamic teachings for present-day governance and Islamic discourses on human rights, among many other themes.
In addition to her own intellectual contributions, Tamara has provided leadership as a senior scholar in her field, shaping Islamic Studies through her work as an innovative project initiator and editor of major reference works. She is Founding Editor-In-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies Online—Islamic Studies and of Wiley-Blackwell’s online journal of Religious Studies Religion Compass. She is Senior Editor of Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and of Oxford’s Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, as well as Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. She has lectured in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright and the U.S. Department of State, among others.
Over the course of her career, Tamara has received important recognition and awards for her superb teaching and mentoring, including the 2018 SFS Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring. At the College of William & Mary, she received a 2012 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence, a prestigious award given annually to only a small cadre of William & Mary faculty. In 2007, she was the recipient at William & Mary of the Most Inspirational Image Award (cited for “inspired teaching”) and the Residence Life Chrystal Apple Award for Outstanding Faculty Service.
At SFS, Tamara always dedicated herself to teaching and engaging students collaboratively in reaching across boundaries of traditional disciplines and approaches. She emphasized the importance of culture, narrative and religion in shaping identities and influencing international affairs. Generations of students will attest to her impact.