Press | Clements Dispatch

Applications are now open for our eighth annual seminar! The 2023 Summer Seminar will be held from Monday, July 17 – Saturday, July 22 at the Pines Resort in Beaver Creek, Colorado. 

The Clements Center mourns the death of Secretary Ash Carter. He was a valued member of our Statecraft Board of Reference, and mentor and leader for many of our students and affiliates. As a policymaker, scholar, and thinker he was without peer. Combining a singular background in both science and the humanities, he served with distinction at all levels of American defense policy, culminating in his consequential leadership of the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. We recall with great fondness hosting his visit to UT-Austin in that role in 2016. Between his stints in government, Secretary Carter could be found at Harvard as a beloved teacher, researcher, and leader of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He leaves a tremendous legacy of service to our nation and our world.

Take a look at the Clements Center’s summer programming and what we have in store for the fall!

The Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin is seeking applications from recent PhD recipients for its Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and from current PhD candidates for its Predoctoral Fellowship Program. Applications are due January 27, 2023.

Strauss Center Director Adam Klein testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, on Protecting Americans’ Personal Data from Hostile Foreign Powers on September 14. 

In “Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion” Clements National Security Fellow Andrew Stravers and his co-authors show how US service members can either build the necessary support to sustain their presence or create added animosity towards the military presence. This project started with a trial study funded by the Clements…

The Clements and Strauss Center’s Intelligence Studies Project is pleased to announce the winner and two semifinalists in the eighth-annual competition recognizing outstanding student research and writing on topics related to intelligence and national security.  

UT News published a profile on Clements Undergraduate Fellow and “renaissance woman” Soren Ettinger DeCou! Soren is a senior and we can’t wait to see what she does after graduation!

Recently spotted on LinkedIn: Former Clements Center Doctoral Fellow Ben Griffin teaching at The United States Military Academy at West Point where he is an Assistant Professor and Chief of the Military History Division in the Department of History. We love seeing our alums at work! 

This August, the Clements Center took our 2022-2023 Undergraduate Fellows to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. to learn how history can be a tool for contemporary decision-making and to introduce them to the institutional structure of national security in the United States. 

Each academic year, the Clements Center hosts several advanced PhD students and recent PhD graduates in foreign and defense policy, international security or related fields. Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellows spend time working on their own research and writing projects, while taking advantage of the many academic resources available here at the University of Texas-Austin.

Laura Quaglia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas Austin, specializing in Public Policy and Comparative Politics.

Amy H. Liu (PhD Emory University; BA Smith College) is an Associate Professor in the Government Department, Co-Director of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Faculty Fellow at the Clements Center.

This July, the Clements Center hosted its eighth annual Summer Seminar in History and Statecraft in scenic Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Nick Romanow was a Clements Center Undergraduate Fellow from 2019 until he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2021 with a Bachelor’s in International Relations and Global Studies.

Clements Center Postdoctoral Fellow William Chou will be a contestant on Jeopardy! next Monday, July 18th! Check www.jeopardy.com/watch for local broadcast stations and times. William is a historian of postwar US-Japanese commercial and security relations and a Jeopardy! fan who achieved his lifelong dream of being on the show. We hope you will tune in to cheer for William.

Launched in 2021, the Texas Podcast Network features podcasts produced by faculty members and staffers at the University of Texas at Austin, including Horns of a Dilemma. These shows bring you into conversations about research and campus culture, covering topics from policy to science to student life.

This year, our annual London Maymester “The U.S., U.K., and World Order” resumed after a two-year hiatus. Twenty undergraduate students from UT-Austin traveled to the United Kingdom and France to study the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom at the world-renowned War Studies Department at King’s College London.

Three Clements Center alumni and affiliates took home prestigious awards at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) annual conference.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Intelligence Studies Project recently hosted its third Texas Intelligence Academy (TIA) in Washington, D.C. From the end of May through early June, fourteen undergraduate students from UT-Austin, UT-El Paso and UT-San Antonio participated in an intensive academic program focused on intelligence and national security. The cohort attended classroom lectures and exercises with former senior intelligence professionals, including former Clements Center Graduate Fellow and current Lecturer and Graduate Director of the Intelligence and National Security Studies Master of Science program at UT-El Paso, Diana Bolsinger and Clements Center Senior National Security Fellow Nick Rasmussen. The lectures covered a variety of intelligence-related topics, including analysis, human intelligence, technical intelligence, covert action, counterterrorism, intelligence reform, and intelligence-policymaker relationships. 

Take a look back at our Spring 2022 Semester! 

With support from the America in the World Consortium, the Clements Center for National Security (University of Texas at Austin), in cooperation with the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs (Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies), and the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy, invited students, scholars and policy practitioners to submit proposals for a one-day conference on issues facing the Indo-Pacific region and its role in American foreign policy and strategy.

The University of Texas at Austin has selected Robert (Bobby) Chesney to serve as the next dean of the School of Law.

On Thursday, May 5^th, the Clements Center for National Security hosted Lech Wałęsa, Former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, for an event on “Russia’s War on Ukraine and Its Global Impact.” This event was spearheaded by the Polish Club at UT and was cosponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Department of Government, the Liberal Arts Honors Program, the McCombs School of Business Department of Business, Government & Society, and Texas Global.

Last week, The Clements Center sent 10 graduate students to the U.S Army War College to participate in their first US Army War College Strategy Competition.