A senior official with the U.S. Department of State will join the School of Public and International Affairs faculty this fall.

Robert Malley, currently on leave from his role as a special envoy for Iran in the State Department, comes to SPIA as a John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and Visiting Lecturer. He will teach a graduate course this fall on foreign policy decision-making, and one to two undergraduate courses in the spring focused on some combination of diplomacy, negotiation, and foreign policy.

“While I am on leave from the State Department, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the next generation of public servants at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University,” Malley said. “I look forward to my time at Princeton and returning to government service in due course.”

Prior to his time with the State Department, Malley was president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. Before that, he served under President Barack Obama as special assistant to the president, senior advisor to the president for the counter-ISIL campaign, White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region, and senior director for the Gulf Region and Syria. Malley also served under President Bill Clinton.

He founded and directed the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program and was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Malley is the author of The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam, and of articles published in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, and several other publications.

“Rob Malley’s significant diplomatic experience and interactions with multiple presidential administrations will be of enormous value to our students,” said SPIA Dean Amaney Jamal. “I am very happy to welcome him to the School and look forward to his contributions.”