Awards

Honorary Degree (2019)

L.H.D.

Doctor of Humane Letters

IU Bloomington Graduate Commencement

Bloomington, Indiana

Presenter: Michael A. McRobbie

About Samantha Power

Ambassador Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. Having earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, Ambassador Power served from 2013 to 2017 as the 28th U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. In this role, she became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, helped build new international law to cripple ISIL's financial networks, and supported President Obama's pathbreaking actions to end the Ebola crisis. From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, where she focused on issues including atrocity prevention; United Nations reform; LGBT and women's rights; the promotion of religious freedom and the protection of religious minorities; and the prevention of human trafficking.

Named one of Time's "100 Most Influential People" and one of Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers," Power has been recognized as a leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world. Her book "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. Power is also author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) and was the co-editor, with Derek Chollet, of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011). She is currently completing a memoir, The Education of an Idealist.

Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Before joining the U.S. government, she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, a columnist for Time, and a National Magazine Award - winning contributor to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.

In 2019, Indiana University awarded Samantha Power with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at its spring graduate commencement ceremony in Bloomington, Indiana for her outstanding achievement to the humanities, and for her continued commitment to community engagement and public service.