Emily Whalen

Emily Whalen is a Non-Resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where she works on the Smart Women, Smart Power (SWSP) Initiative.

Emily was a 2020–2021 and 2021–2022 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Emily’s research examines U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, theories of civil war and the state, and global history during the late Cold War.

Prior to joining the Clements Center, Emily was an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy with the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a Smith Richardson Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s International Security Studies Program. She was an affiliated scholar at the American University of Beirut’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, and a recipient of grants from the PEO Sisterhood, the American Association of University Women, the John Anson Kittredge Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.  In addition to her scholarly work, Emily has served as a historical consultant for the EastWest Institute, and a coder for the Armed Conflict Location and Event Database, covering political violence in Pakistan. Her writing appears in several online publications, including Foreign Policy, and H-Diplo. She earned her doctorate in international history in 2020 from the University of Texas at Austin.