Hanson named vice provost, Reves Center director
Hanson comes to the College from the University of Washington, where he served as vice provost for global affairs and the Herbert J. Ellison professor at the department of political science.
He replaces Ronald St. Onge, who has served as interim director of the Reves Center since September.
"I am deeply honored and personally thrilled to accept the position of vice provost for international affairs and director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies,” Hanson said. “The College of William and Mary is already one of the very best liberal arts universities in the world, and precisely because of its fidelity to that tradition, I believe it is uniquely placed to benefit from the continuing globalization of higher education in the decades ahead."
Hanson, who will report to Provost Michael R. Halleran, will promote the strengthening and expansion of W&M’s international programs, serve as advocate for all international programs and initiatives, and collaborate with faculty, students and other constituencies in both sustaining existing international initiatives and building new ones.
“Adding an educator of Stephen’s background and experience is an
enormously positive step in our continued efforts to expand William &
Mary’s international presence,” Halleran said. “The candidates for this position were universally strong, further testimony of the work the College has performed in this area. Under Stephen’s guidance, we are confident our success in this area, a critical part of our strategic plan, will continue to grow.”
Hanson received his B.A. from Harvard University (1985) and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He served from 2000-2008 as the director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.
He is the author of two books: Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (2010) and Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (1997), which received the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich book award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also co-author (with Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, and Philip Roeder) of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (2001), co-editor (with Grzegorz Ekiert) of Capitalism and Democracy in Eastern and Central Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (2003), and co-editor (with Willfried Spohn) of Can Europe Work?: Germany and the Reconstruction of Postcommunist Societies (1995).
Hanson won the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004 and the university’s Outstanding Undergraduate Mentor Award in 2005. He has also taught as a visiting associate professor of government at Harvard University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, a visiting scholar at the department of politics and international relations at Oxford University, and a research scholar at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. From 2004-2008, he was the academic director of the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS), based in Washington D.C.
Hanson has served on the editorial boards of Slavic Review, Comparative Political Studies, and Demokratizatsiya. Since 2002, he has served on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Comparative Politics.
He has received grant support from the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. Hanson has been invited to lecture at a number of prestigious academic and policy-oriented institutions, including the Aspen Institute, Brown University, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Hamburg University, the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, Indiana University, the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Moscow), the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow), and Yale University.
The Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies is the university locus for international programs and activities. The Reves Center plays a key role in the oversight of the College’s study abroad programs, provides services to international students and scholars, and supports faculty international research. The vice provost serves as its director and oversees the center staff.
