Project Scholars

Melody Barnes is a cofounder and principal of MBSquared Solutions LLC, a domestic strategy firm, and vice provost for global student leadership initiatives at New York University. She is also a senior fellow at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. From January 2009 until January 2012, she was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, a position in which she provided strategic advice to President Obama and worked closely with members of the cabinet coordinating the domestic policy agenda across the administration. Until 2008, Barnes was the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive research institute and think tank. From 1995 until 2003, Barnes worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee; she served as his chief counsel from 1998 until she left the committee in 2003.

Jared Bernstein joined the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in May 2011 as a Senior Fellow. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, and a member of President Obama’s economic team. He is the author and coauthor of numerous books for both popular and academic audiences, including Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People, Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?, nine editions of The State of Working America, and his latest book The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.

Hal Brands is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University.  His most recent books are The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (co-edited with Jeremi Suri), and What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush.  He has written widely on U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy.  During 2015-16, he is serving in the Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow.

Robert F. Bruner is University Professor, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, and Dean Emeritus at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.

Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.  Author or editor of nine books on American foreign policy, his most recent is The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea (Oxford University Press, 2015).  He is currently writing When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the Surprisingly Peaceful End of the Cold War (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt). 

Michèle Flournoy is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). She served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012.  She was the principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy, oversight of military plans and operations, and in National Security Council deliberations. She led the development of DoD’s 2012 Strategic Guidance and represented the Department in dozens of foreign engagements, in the media and before Congress.

Gary Freeman is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught since 1976. His publications deal with immigration policy and politics in the Western democracies. He has held Fellowships from the German Marshall Fund and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Two Collaborative Scholar awards supported research in Australia.

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He served as a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush. The author thanks Donald Marron and Adele Morris for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

William A. Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. Galston is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization. He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to January 2006, he was Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy. From 1969 to 1970 Galston served as a member of the United States Marine Corps and was honorably discharged.

Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the Director of the Management and Leadership Initiative at Brookings. She is a public sector scholar with wide experience in government, academia and politics. Kamarck is an expert on government innovation and reform in the United States, OECD countries and developing countries. In addition, she also focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in many American presidential campaigns.

Anna O. Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the department of political science at City University of New York, Brooklyn College. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of U.S. constitutional law and history and U.S. immigration law and history. She is the author of “The Immigration Battle in American Courts” (Cambridge 2010). Her current book project is on immigration federalism and slavery from the colonial period to 1882.

Maya MacGuineas is the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget as well as the head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. Her areas of expertise include budget, tax, and economic policy. In the spring of 2009, MacGuineas did a stint on The Washington Post editorial board, covering economic and fiscal policy. She has worked at the Brookings Institution and on Wall Street. The author thanks Erich Hartman for research and writing assistance.

David A. Martin is the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law at the University of Virginia. He has published numerous books, scholarly articles, and op-ed essays on immigration, refugees, constitutional law, and international law, including a leading casebook on immigration and citizenship law, now in its eighth edition. As Principal Deputy General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security from January 2009 to December 2010, and in earlier government service at the Department of State and the Department of Justice, he was closely involved in critical legal and policy developments in the immigration field.

Guian McKee is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He joined the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program in August 2002, and since 2009 has also been associated with the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. He is currently working on a book that traces the rise of the urban health care economy in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.

Dambisa Moyo is a global economist and author who analyzes the macroeconomy and international affairs. In particular, her work examines the interplay of international business and the global economy while highlighting the key opportunities for investment. She serves on the boards of Barclays Bank, Barrick Gold, SAB Miller, and Seagate Technology and advises companies, corporate boards, CEOs, and management on investment decisions, capital allocation, and risk management. Dambisa was named by TIME Magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College. He has published multiple books, the most recent of which is Resilient America: Electing Nixon, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (2014).  Other recent books are The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014, with Sidney Milkis (2015), The Presidency and the Political System, 10th ed. (2014), and The Elections of 2012 (2013). He is editor of the American Presidential Elections book series for the University Press of Kansas and is currently writing a book about the 1992 election.

Margaret O’Mara is an associate professor at the University of Washington and a historian of the modern United States, specializing in political, economic, and urban history. Her scholarly work examines America’s centurylong transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, the role of political leaders and political institutions in this transition, and how economic change affects built environments, social equity, and culture. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley, which explored how Silicon Valley came to be and what the Cold War had to do with it, as well as a number of articles and book chapters examining various intersections between cities, politics, and technology. Her most recent book, Pivotal Tuesdays, explores four game-changing presidential elections of the 20th century (1912, 1932, 1968, 1992) and places these campaign sagas in broader social and cultural context. O’Mara is also a faculty affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center and the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies.

Robert C. Pianta is dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. He also holds positions as the Novartis Professor of Education, founding director of the Curry School’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), professor of psychology at UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences, and director of the National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education. Pianta’s research and policy interests focus on teacher-student interactions and relationships and on the improvement of teachers’ contributions to students’ learning and development. He is the author of more than 250 articles, 50 book chapters, and 10 books, and has been a principal investigator on research and training grants totaling more than $55 million. Among other research measures and instruments, Pianta is the creator of an observational assessment of teacher-student interactions known as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ or CLASS. CLASS is used by every Head Start program in the country, affecting 50,000 teachers and over half a million students.

Ray Scheppach is Miller Center Senior Fellow for Economic Policy and the former executive director of the National Governors Association (NGA), serving from January 1983-January 2011. He is a Professor of Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on the role of the states in public policy and on government budgeting. Before joining the National Governors Association, Scheppach was first assistant director, and then deputy director, of the Congressional Budget Office, which gave him an understanding of a comparably broad range of issues at the federal level.  He has authored or co-authored four books on economics, including the 1984 book New Directions in Economic Policy: An Agenda for the 1980s.

Richard Schragger is the Perre Bowen Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he has taught for 15 years. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy, and the constitutional and economic status of cities. He is the author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age.

Marc Selverstone is Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program and University of Virginia Associate Professor. He is editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), and author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Harvard University Press, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2010. He is presently at work on The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns American national institutions and American political history.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Professor Suri is the author and editor of seven books, most recently Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy and The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft. Professor Suri is also a contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Wired, and Politico, among other newspapers and magazines. 

Daniel J. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Political Science and a program director and senior scholar of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. He has published extensively on immigration politics and policy, including “Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control” (Princeton), which won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. public policy, and The Politics of International Migration (Oxford). He also has done work on social movements, political parties, Congress, the presidency, civil rights, and civil liberties. Currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, he is finishing a book on the origins and development of unauthorized immigration as a modern American dilemma, titled “Democracy’s Shadow.” 

Peter Wehner is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues. In 2015 he was named a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and he contributes regularly to Commentary magazine’s blog “Contentions.” Mr. Wehner served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations prior to becoming deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush. In 2002, he was asked to head the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he generated policy ideas, reached out to public intellectuals, published op-eds and essays, and provided counsel on a range of domestic and international issues. He was also a senior adviser to the Romney-Ryan 2012 presidential campaign.

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he has also served as dean of the Graduate School and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs.  Before and during his academic career he has held various full and part-time positions at all levels of American government, including in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon.  He also directed a small and short-lived federal agency, the 9/11 Commission.  A former of the Intelligence Advisory Boards for President Bush and President Obama, he is currently a member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Secretary Carter.