MIDDLEBURY, Vt.-Allison Stanger, a professor of political science at Middlebury College and director of the College’s Rohatyn Center for International Affairs (RCFIA), has been selected as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

According to the council’s Web site, www.cfr.org, the organization is an independent, non-partisan center dedicated to improving understanding of the world and the foreign policy choices that face the United States and other governments.

Based in New York City and with an office in Washington, D.C., the council sponsors research; convenes meetings; publishes books, articles and the journal Foreign Affairs; and provides up-to-date information on the world and U.S. foreign policy at its Web site.

Stanger was one of 76 people selected this spring for full membership in the council, from among 156 candidates. There are roughly 4,200 council members, with a third in the New York area, a third from the Washington, D.C., region, and the rest from throughout the U.S. and overseas. About 1,100 members are professors, researchers or administrators at colleges and universities, representing about 25 percent of the membership.

Stanger joins Middlebury College President Emeritus Olin Robison as a council member, and is the first active Middlebury faculty member to be so honored. Former U.S. Ambassador to France Felix G. Rohatyn, a 1949 Middlebury graduate and the individual for whom the Rohatyn Center is named, is also a member, as is Jessica K. Liebowitz, founding editor-in-chief of the Gallup Management Journal and the spouse of Middlebury College President-elect Ron Liebowitz.

“I received the official invitation last week and accepted before leaving for Europe,” Stanger said on June 23, from Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. “If you look at the membership list, you’ll find all the usual foreign policy luminaries. The academics on the Council are typically from research universities, so I was very pleased to be asked.”

Stanger, whose areas of expertise include European politics, international relations and foreign policy, joined the Middlebury faculty in 1991 and has been the director of the College’s RCFIA since 1999. She holds a doctorate in political science from Harvard University. Stanger has worked and studied in such European cities as Paris and Moscow, and is the co-editor and co-translator, with her husband Middlebury College Professor of Political Science Michael Kraus, of the book “Irreconcilable Differences? Explaining Czechoslovakia’s Dissolution” (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). Stanger has been a research fellow at a number of organizations, including the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Her articles and essays have appeared in many publications, including East European Constitutional Review, Oxford International Review, New England Review, Literarni Noviny (Prague), and Slovenske Listy (Prague).

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