Simmons College

Established with the help of a generous grant from Joan Melber Warburg '45, widow of James P. Warburg, the Warburg Chair in International Relations brings to Simmons a distinguished practitioner who has had significant experience at a responsible level in international relations. The Warburg professor normally remains for a two or three-year term. He or she joins the interdisciplinary program in international relations, encompassing the fields of political science, economics, history, women's studies, and foreign languages, and sits on the Steering Committee of that program.

The Warburg Chair teaches the senior seminar in international relations in the fall and a special topics course in the spring. The Chair also holds occasional luncheon seminars with faculty, staff, and students and organizes other programming throughout the academic year, such as a lecture series or an academic conference.

Current Warburg Professor: Catharin Dalpino

Catharin Dalpino is the Joan M. Warburg Professor of International Relations. Her career in foreign affairs includes positions in government, international organizations, think tanks and non-governmental organizations. She is a specialist both in US-Asian relations and in democracy promotion.

Professor Dalpino has served as the State Department's first Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, in the Clinton administration. Before that she worked at the United Nations in Geneva; at the World Bank; and, for ten years, with The Asia Foundation. She was The Asia Foundation's resident representative for Thailand and re-opened the Foundation's programs in Laos and Cambodia.

After leaving the State Department, Professor Dalpino was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she covered US policy in Asia. She has also been a Resident Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; a Nonresident Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council; a Visiting Scholar in Southeast Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; and a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

Prior to coming to Simmons, she was Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Director of Georgetown's Thai Studies Program for five years. She was also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins/SAIS and with the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

Professor Dalpino has also worked as an advocate for improving relations with the countries of the former Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). She was the Washington Representative for the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, and Director of the Aspen Institute's Project on Agent Orange/Dioxin in Vietnam.

Professor Dalpino is the author of two books, Anchoring Third Wave Democracies (Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1998) and Deferring Democracy: Encouraging Openness in Authoritarian Regimes (Brookings Institution Press, 2000). At the present time, she is at work on two books, one of the US-Thailand alliance and one on US policy toward Southeast Asia after September 11. She is also conducting research on how the Vietnam War is taught to generations of Americans born after 1975.
Professor Dalpino was educated at Bard College (BA) and San Francisco State University (MA).

The Warburg Professors have included:

• 1983-1985 Robert E. White, former United States Ambassador to El Salvador
• 1985-1988 David Anderson, former United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia
• 1988-1990 Monteagle Stearns, former United States Ambassador to Greece
• 1990-1991 Elizabeth Pond, eminent writer and journalist
• 1991-1993 Harry Barnes, former United States Ambassador to India
• 1993-1995 Frank Crigler, former United States Ambassador to Somalia
• 1995-1998 Denis McLean, former New Zealand Ambassador to the United States
• 1998-2000 Erik Jensen, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
• 2000-2004 Charles F. Dunbar, former President of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs
• 2004-2007 Walter C. Carrington, former United States Ambassador to Nigeria and Senegal. 
• 2007-2010 Thomas Hull, former United States Ambassador to the Republic of Sierra Leone