We are delighted to announce and welcome three Fletcher faculty members who will be joining the Fares Center.

Elisabeth Leake

Dr. Elisabeth Leake is the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History and Associate Professor of History at the Fletcher School, which she joined in 2022. She studied global history at Yale University and the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 2013. She held a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2013–16, before taking up a lectureship at the University of Leeds in 2016. Dr. Leake’s research to date has been broadly focused on the global histories of decolonization and the Cold War. Dr. Leake is currently working on a global history of decolonization and developing a research network examining the comparative and interconnected histories of oppositional politics and modes of dissent in the years immediately following political independence in decolonizing states.

Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on the Horn of Africa, and on conflict, food security and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity 2015), Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), and New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021). He is co-author (with Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch and Raga Makawi) of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution (Hurst and Oxford Univ Press 2022) and co-editor and contributor to Accountability for Mass Starvation: Testing the limits of the law (Oxford Univ Press 2022).

Chidi Odinkalu

Chidi Odinkalu is Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law at the Fletcher School.