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Samantha Power

Samantha Power

  • Democratic
Career

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 2013-2017

Education

Bachelor's, Yale University
J.D, Harvard Law School

Details

Born: Sep 21, 1970

Ambassador U.S. Cabinet Member

Biography

Samantha Jane Power served as the United States ambassador to the United Nations from August 5, 2013 to January 20, 2017.

Power was born September 21, 1970. Her family emigrated from Ireland to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1979. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Yale University in 1992. From 1993 to 1996, Power worked as a journalist, covering the Yugoslav Wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1999.

From 1998 to 2002, Power served as the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later served as the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. Her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide published in 2002, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003.

From 2005 to 2006, Power was a foreign policy fellow in then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama's office. She was a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign until she resigned after making derogatory remarks about then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama's primary opponent. She joined the Obama State Department transition team in November 2008 and served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to March 2013. Following her tenure as ambassador, Power returned to Harvard as law professor.

Sources:

Harvard Law School (n.d.). Samantha Power. Retrieved on April 29, 2020 from https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/11712/Power.

Munro, A. (n.d.). Samantha Power: American journalist and government official. In Britannica. Retrieved on April 29, 2020 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samantha-Power.

Speeches